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High Tech Wages - Salary or Hourly?
cremes asks: "I'm a technology manager (not a PHB) at a Financial Services firm, and I've recently bumped my head against another dreaded management issue. Most of my employees are salaried with a rather weak "overtime" compensation package. I've asked them if they want to go hourly, but there is resistance. I promised them I would Ask Slashdot what the country & world are doing about high tech wages and the feelings about flat salary versus hourly (+ time and a half). So, how are most of you paid? Salary or by the hour?" We've discussed the amount that you think is fair compensation for this industry, so it's only fitting we talk about how that amount should be earned.
Salary Definatly...
huh?
I work for an IT consultancy firm in The Netherlands and I get paid a salary. It is the most common in The Netherlands. I prefer salary over an hourly rate because it gives me more security (when you're sick or when the firm has no assignments, you get paid.)
As a systems engineer, I was on salary. (Got laid off 2 days ago, everyone else is hiring except Ikon and they're laying people off. Go figure.) Minimal overtime though, and if there was any it was usually compensated by time off or applied towards your monthly hours billed. My company kept track of hours billed and paid a $100 bonus for every 10 hrs over 120/month billed.
p.s. I fucking hate first post idiots, especially when they have nothing to say.
From your short description, it sounds like the weak overtime is not really a problem for your co-workers - if it were, they'd probably jump at your suggestion. Is it a problem that they are not eager enough to put in extra hours to get the job done? Is that your problem? Because if it is, you need to look at working conditions other than pay - find a way to make folks care about the project, care enough to be proud when a milestone is reached, and when you've reached that state they'll be more than happy to discuss perks like the amount of overtime pay. If the work is uninteresting, the amount of overtime pay is irrelevant, folks will leave at five no matter what.
:-)
Of course, I'm over-simplyfying, but you really didn't give me much background to work with
-John
Anyways... I like the Idea of a set wage. We are professionals, and like professionals who work for a single company, an annual salary is standard.
It also makes things a heck of a lot easier for me to deal with finances if I earn a set amount each month. Also that way the companys expectations for me remain fairly constant.
If my responsability and workload changes, then I'll re-negotiate the wages I'm earning. (usually with someones balls in the vice I just took mine out of =)
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
While it has a few drawbacks, I like being salary. If anybody asked me to punch a clock, or fill in a timesheet, I'd quit that job immediately. I'm salaried with NO bonus for overtime except for the fact that I'm very well compensated to begin with, given my workload and such.
I like getting the same amount in my paycheck. I like the comfortable feeling knowing that 'if i work 30 hours for 2 weeks after putting in 4 70 hour weeks, it won't hurt my paycheck.'
Honestly, if you put me on hourly, I'd put my resume out to a recruiter, even if it were equivalent. Hourly pay feels very temporary.
I work for a local computer store and I get paid hourly, either for work I do at the shop or off site, working on networks and hardware installations. It's much easier to work this way....just count up at the end of the day ;o)
---- Robert Anton Wilson: "Belief is the death of intelligence."
As a tech for a small IT consultancy firm/ISP, I have seen several of my co-workers be gyped out of money by being put on salary. I am an hourly employee who works sometimes 25 hours in a week and sometimes 60. In the past 2 years, I have worked enough overtime to put my total annual pay at a higher dollar amount than my salaried counterparts. They do the same amount of work--if not more--that I do, yet they make less money for it. Doesn't seem fair to me...
I work for a local computer store and get paid hourly, either for work on site at the shop, or for work off site, working on networks and hardware installations.
;o)
Much easier this way - just count up at the end of the day!
---- Robert Anton Wilson: "Belief is the death of intelligence."
Salary is great.. especially when it is compensated for mad crazy overtime hours. even better is comp time for any major off-hours work.
Personally, I'm working part-time now.. and am paid hourly. i'm getting really annoyed by the accounting people always bugging me for my hours worked.. i'm just terrible at keeping track.
Most people at the company I work for get a salary, a 150% overtime compensation for nights and saturdays and 200% for sundays and public holidays based on worked hours.
I think this system is reassuring for people who want the security of a salary system and gives your coworkers the advantages of an hourly based fee.
If you want security and stability (usually a preference for those with family or a large rent/mortgage bill), salaried income is definitely preferable. An hourly income scheme can (and should!) pay more, but can leave you in the dust if you get ill, when you take vacation, etc.
Since after my student days I have worked exclusively on a salaried basis, and prefer it this way. My contract states that I should work about 40h/week, and that occasional overtime may be required - without extra pay. This is quite a normal clause, and is fine by me: Instead of being nitpicky about extra hours spent in the office, the company rewards performers with a nice bonus at the end of the year...
-- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
monthly salary that is what keeps me going.
I would definitely prefer hourly. Why? Because I would rather control my own time. It seems in this industry people get high salaries but they are expected to put in a lot of overtime. If I must put in overtime, I'd rather get paid extra for it.
Speaking of which, since my dream is to be able to travel and work at the same time, I am going to look for a consulting job when I graduate. Does anyone have any thoughts/advice/experience to share about this? How about any contacts, or websites where I could find out more? Thanks!
Interesting that no one mentioned stock options on SlashDot. Salary + stock options is preferably to me than hourly. Or Salary + Bonus. Because depending on the bonus model, it can differentiate you from another salaried employee who may not have produced as much. If I did not feel I would be getting a bonus or stock options out of a job, I would prefer being a high paid hourly/dailyrate consultant.
I am graduating in May and am starting to get job offers. My most recent was a decent offer that included everything it should (i.e., all the medical benefits, 401(k), etc.), a signing bonus and 1.5 x pay for overtime. How exactly does overtime work for a salaried position? Is anyone else out there in that situation? It sounds like a salary where you still report hours to me.
Some would probably respond that you just negotiate a higher wage. Where they live, that might work. In Arizona, you get paid what the employer feels like paying or move (something I'm seriously considering!). By working hourly, I am able to make considerably more than I would as a salaried employee.
Another benefit is that you have a choice when a slow spell comes for the company. A couple of salaried people got laid off during a slow period with my firm. I just (voluntarily and gladly) reduced my hours and used the off-time for continuing education.
That's my 2 cents worth...
Tech people prefer two things in a job.
RULE #1. It's fun
RULE #2. It pays well
Now how does this apply to hourly/salry wages?
From RULE #1 we know that timecards are bad because we don't like to fill them out. It is a nucience and why should our employer care if I took a two hour break to play Quake3 Test?
From Rule #2 we know that people on salary who don't get overtime pay get really razzed.
Solution:
if salary
then hourly
if hourly
then salary
or
Just give them a salary, and a bonus if they are clearly working hours above and beyond 40hrs a week. Duh.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I work a summer job at a firm when I am not at school. A year ago last summer everything was wage. I spent a lot of time working over time with no compensation accept my own desire to get the job done. This summer the pay system was hourly, top the hours up to a point and then a max of 10 hours at 1.5 time. I thought it would be better, but it wasn't. Keeping track of hours is a pain in the ass. It also made me feel like I was there to put in time, rather then to get the job done. I also felt like I had to be working all the time: standing around talking to someone for a while made me feel guilty because I was charging the company for the time. The year before I always knew that I would more then make up for any water cooler/other time some time in the evening. That may sound good from an employers perspective, but I felt less creative when droning along under the microscope. Luckly they pay me almost nothing so I didn't feel THAT guilty :). If you want to give your workers a reason to stick around after hours then reward them for getting the job done quickly and well, not for being there.
i was once salery + OT. the pay was not Great, but the Dedication was there. when they asked if i would work ot i was more than happy to. then we went salery, THey Have me a Raise, and went Exempt. i thought it was great till i saw the first pay check. then i realised i was not really given a Raise, but a pay Cut. and now, the company wants even more OT. on this Salery. i now say no can do. and the Dedication is no longer there. as soon as my shift ends, BAM!! im outa there. if they cut my pay, and put me back on hourly then i would be real Happy. after the calculations here is what i found: salery i get the Actual PAy im assigned, no more no less. SAlery + OT i get my wages, plus the imcome above that. lets say i was Getting 38,500 salery only will ensure i get this. salery + OT will net me on average 50,000 per year. huge jump. now, lets say im making Salery _ot, then they change it and give me a raise. it will estimate 44,500 -- way Below the actual income i was getting. same senario with the Straight Hourly Workers.
I work a summer job at a firm when I am not at school. A year ago last summer everything was wage. I spent a lot of time working over time with no compensation accept my own desire to get the job done.
:).
This summer the pay system was hourly, top the hours up to a point and then a max of 10 hours at 1.5 time. I thought it would be better, but it wasn't.
Keeping track of hours is a pain in the ass. It also made me feel like I was there to put in time, rather then to get the job done. I also felt like I had to be working all the time: standing around talking to someone for a while made me feel guilty because I was charging the company for the time. The year before I always knew that I would more then make up for any water cooler/other time some time in the evening. That may sound good from an employers perspective, but I felt less creative when droning along under the microscope. Luckly they pay me almost nothing so I didn't feel THAT guilty
If you want to give your workers a reason to stick around after hours then reward them for getting the job done quickly and well, not for being there.
Sorry about the formatting before.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Many many many people out there work at startups, where overtime is pretty much a bad word. The only commendation I'm going to get for pulling a 100 hour work week is "good job". I'm salaried at a pretty high rate, but I made a sh*tload more when I was a contractor. Next job/raise I get should put me to 90-100% of what I was making as a contractor so its not horrible, but it still feels like wage slavery sometimes.
In every salaried job I have had, my contract of employment said I was to work 40hrs/week, with occasional unpaid overtime. Now, you people who work in IT (i.e. pretty much every slashdotter?). When was the last time you worked a 40 hour week?
Just to remind you, that would mean, say, coming into work at 9am and leaving at 5:30pm (allowing a half hour for lunch), five days a week. Have you *ever* done that? Isn't something like 10am - 8 or 9pm a more familiar pattern?
Of course, you could insist on just working the hours stated in your contract. But you might like to keep your job instead. So you just go with the flow, and live with the situation. You abandon your social life and turn in 50hr+ weeks - for nothing extra. Is your time really worth nothing?.
I like being paid by the hour. If I work a 12-hour day (common enough) then I get paid for 12 hours. If I have to come in on the weekend, that goes down on my timesheet too - so I welcome overtime rather than resenting it.
Being salaried should not always proclude getting overtime pay. It is pretty easy to figure out your hourly rate and how much you should be compensated for overtime. Convincing your employer that you should be paid that ammount is another matter. On a work term of mine there was much overtime needed to get the job done. We worked 80hrs or more a week. The manager authorized overtime and both salaried and hourly paid were compensated with time and a half. However the salaried worked the first 4 hours "free." In this situation the overtime was a rare occurance and lasted about 4-5 weeks. Once the job was done, we went back to our 40hrs weeks.
If you find that you and your team are continually working 50-60hrs weeks when you signed on for 40hrs then your employer needs to do something. Either hire more people or raise your salary. If it is significant ammounts of occasional overtime then maybe your employer should pay you for it, or give you an equal ammount of time off instead. The time off deal seems quite common among my friends.
Myself I am salaried and wouldn't have it any other way for reasons given by other posters.
Salary is based on 40hr/week, but engineers are expected to do what it takes to keep projects on schedule. Personally I prefer it, because I don't have to constantly justify how time is spent.
Although it's perhaps not unexpected that permanent employees see money as the principal advantage of working freelance, that really misses the point entirely.
Contractor rates are higher only as a side effect of the main advantage, which is that you are independent and you negociate as a peer with customers and with agencies. This does translate into higher rates of earning, yes, but it has a much more important effect than just that. You're free, free of the corporate politics, free of the need to take crap just to stay on the career ladder, free to speak your mind as an independent computer professional rather than being just a cog in a machine. If you're good then technical management appreciates you regardless of whether you're permanent or contractor of course, but that's not true of PHBs and top management; they don't appreciate techies at all, so don't feel any qualms in making them pay decent market rates for their lack of appreciation that it's technology that underpins their business. Quite possibly they'll appreciate you more when you stand out on their spreadsheet.
I'd recommend it to anyone that knows his or her stuff. Far from lacking in job security as permanent staff would have you believe, it is an extraordinarily secure form of employment in the current burgeoning Internet environment where skills are the main bottleneck to corporate expansion online, as long as you site yourself within commuting distance of one of the corridors of activity. You'll never look back.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah...you have 16 hours of work you have to get done in one working day. why get paid for only half of the work that you do?
I seriously doubt a first post kiddie with a hotmail address actually earns a steady wage from a respectable company. Perhaps ripicheep gets five dollars each year from some 12 year old 31337 haXor kiddie for giving him scripts he found on the net.
In general though, I have noticed that working on an hourly basis tends to make me feel more temporary. I am part-time and all only working like 10-20 hours a week, so hourly definitely makes sense. But that fscking time-clock is annoying, especially the one I use. It won't let you punch in early and won't let you leave late. It used to be open for computer techs (which I am) but they put us on stricter scheduling now.
Anyway though... When doing freelance computer work (or anything like this, even plumbers, electricians and all that) it's usually better to get an idea of how much it is going to cost you to do certain jobs and charge by the job. People are really reluctant to give up $60/hr for "General computer labor" (which is actually a good price) but a "Well, I can install that hard-drive for $50.00" usually makes it easier to swallow. Incidently, that is how Best Buy (where I work) prices computer labor.
Anyway, I'd much rather get paid a salary and have a set of tasks to do than get paid hourly and treated like a grunt helper. Of course since I am a full-time student and this is part time work, hourly is about the only thing that makes sense.
Remember that though, hourly makes you feel like you are temporary, or part-time, or a grunt. Those are not the kind of feelings you want your workers to have. But I can't say that working hourly is bad, it is definitely the right solution for a company like Best Buy.
Just my $.02
I have worked for companies who were hourly rate based - they are too havily focused on time, almost anal about it. Now I am salaried based on a 42.5 hour week - although I usually make it about a 45 - 47 hour week. If I go over 50 hours I get bits of free time, and occasionally when things go above 80 hours I get a free holiday.
Don't get me wrong, overtime pay would be nice, but they pay me well enough to pay my bills, mortgage etc so I don't really need much more.
And I know I am doing the same, but...when you reply to the first post morons, you are giving them reason to continue. Maybe we need a sign that says: Please don't feed the negative energy creatures.
Salary means you're getting paid to do a job. Hourly remuneration can mean you're getting paid to fill in a timesheet.
If you're concerned about the performance of your employees, I'd suggest that method of remuneration is a fairly trivial place to start. The hardest thing in any organisation is developing a HR strategy where employees rewarded for outcomes and their true value, rather than being a body who clocks more hours in the office than anyone else.
I'd ask yourself some questions like:
If you answered yes to all these questions, then you wouldn't be having any trouble with incentive under a salary based system. I know it sounds like hard work - but these people are the main source of value for your company! You've got to spend some time making sure they're working to their best and have opportunities to extend themselves.
If you don't have this stuff sorted out, hourly remuneration won't boost your productivity. In fact, it'll probably reduce it as people try and find ways to falsify time sheets etc.
My 0.02
Danny
the salaried employees are "exempt" status (exempt from what I don't really know, maybe overtime pay :-) The hourly employees are "non-exempt" -- most hourly employees are doing things like running wafers through the fab or repairing equipment. High level engineering or programming is almost never done by hourly employees unless they are contractors. Also, I know they don't receive nearly as much for stock options. So, for Intel, and I think many large companies are similar, its much better to be salaried . . . the company simply places a higher value on their salaried employees.
I wasn't sure about it to start with - I would have preferred to be paid hourly, with overtime - I don't get any overtime at the moment.
I've got used to it though - the security is nice, and it also lets me relax at work more - I usually do more hours than are strictly necessary, and it means I'm happy concentrate on Linux hacking and other stuff at work, whereas if I were paid by the hour I wouldn't be.
It is not until you mentioned it that I remember how much I despised watching the clock when I was paid hourly. Timesheets will always be annoying, but watching the clock sucked. I dosen't help when the manager feels that every minute must be spent "producing."
Now I am salaried. I go to work, get the job(s) done and on time. Some weeks I work late, others I go home early. No one really cares how many hours I work as long as I do my work. I still ask for overtime hours if needed (long projects with little time), but I don't mind occasionly putting in a few hours unclaimed. I often do work late if the project is interesting.
If you want to give your workers a reason to stick around after hours then reward them for getting the job done quickly and well, not for being there.
There nothing like the little benefits to keep workers happy and productive. This includes recognition for a job well done.
If you think getting paid a salary makes your job more permanent, you need to pick up the clue phone. I've had contracts (hourly) end suddenly and jobs (salary) end suddenly. My last FTE position stopped making payroll. Last I heard there are still people working there, unpaid, after a month and a half of no payroll, while I'm out earning serious coin already. Nothing is permanent. Time is the only thing you have. Giving it to losers and getting played out like a bitch is your own problem, and it only hurts you. Be a stud, stand up for yourself, don't think any job is forever.
This situation then becomes the basis for a decision about a possible change. If I was working somewhere where I put in a regularly low number of hours (like 35/week) with only very occasional overtime, I would be very hesitant to switch over to hourly pay as it might mean a serious drop in my paycheck. The reverse situation is obvious.
What isn't so obvious is that being an employee (either salary or hourly) has a implication of loyalty. The employer is giving you "benefits" in exchange for a long-term commitment (you to your employer, but certainly not the other way around). But the fact is that if one becomes a contractor, there is usually a significant jump in compensation which often more than covers the "benefits" of employment and has the additional benefits that there is no need to feel loyalty to a corporation that is not reciprocating that feeling (no matter what corporate propaganda may be), and that you have ultimate control over how much money you actually earn.
Currently, I do a little of both. I have a nice full-time day job, and I take small contracts on the side to cover my options and establish a network of contacts that I can rely on should my employer cease to be "loyal"...
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
As an addendum to the above, contracting implies hourly accounting, since that's the norm for freelance employment in the computer industry (maybe in all industries?).
Since we do outrageous hours (90 hours per week is not unusual for permanent and contract staff alike), the double benefit of higher and hourly rates should be obvious. Just keep your Palm Pilot with you, press IN/OUT when relevant, and at the end of the week you pop out a pretty timesheet. No hassle, and there's the added benefit that if management is tight with money and misguidedly pushes only permanent staff to work extra hours then you have more time to pursue your own interests. Hourly remuneration carries the huge advantage of making people at the top appreciate the work you do in the only way they understand.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Look I've included a great bonus in lieu of overtime.
The Sums
£60,000 per year + Bonus @ 30% + expenses @ 10% = £84,000 (Wow, like $134,400!)
£60 per hour, 50 hours per week = £3000 per week...
Shall we have 4 weeks holiday + 2 weeks sick? (yes lets...)
46 weeks at £3000 = £138,000 (Um that's $220,800)
So think of it as giving £54,000 to your employer for the privileges of salaried employment, there's the pension, um the dental care, um did I mention the pension?
P.S. I don't get £60 an hour, but the numbers are easier a little smaller
Some alternatives to salary can be advantageous to both yourself and your employer. In my last job with an ISP everyone had a 'home office' budget to spend on equipment and books. You could choose what you wanted and didn't have to pay extra tax since the stuff was technically for working from home, and the employer could put it down as a business expense. Of course the down side was you had to return the stuff if you left the company, but as soon as you decided to leave you just stocked up on CDs and printer cartridges because they never asked for them back. My current employer is offering a weekend in the Ardenne for anyone called out on New Year's eve.
I'm on salary, and although my contract actually does say something about OT compensation, my bosses told me rather bluntly before I took the position that they don't pay OT.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, my situation is easily exploited. OT gives your project managers an incentive to plan projects rationally and well, so you're less likely to end up with a week of all-nighters just before the deadline. And I sure have had weeks like that. Those are the days that you're certain you don't get paid enough.
On the other hand, the salary is pretty good and takes OT into account (although I suspect that an hourly wage would turn out better during those murder weeks). And after the deadline has passed and the crunch is over, I can always take some time off. The bosses have always known what was going on and were more than happy to let me rest up. And I would hate a timeclock. I was rented out for a year to a company where I had to punch in and out, and it taught to just Not Give a Damn about what wasn't finished at quittin' time.
I think a lot of us programmers have to admit that we don't pull those all-nighters just for the money we're making. As much as I hate them, I just don't want a project I'm working on to fail, and feel that it will reflect on me even if the problem was caused by someone else's poor planning. (*I* know that, but outsiders, including the customer, might not.)
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
In the UK the rule seems to be that (simplifying somewhat) you pay employees salaries and contractors hourly.
I guess it depends on what you want. Simplifying again: Mercenaries who are there for the money, the money, and only the money, or employees who come in to work for the money, the social environment and the interesting challenges that you provide.
Don't get me wrong! There is nothing wrong with contractors. I was one, once, and I am employing contractors at this very moment. Very useful and probably, in many cases, a more honest approach to work.
I guess I'm trying to say more or less the same as this insightful post (hint to moderators!) who suggests that you need to look carefully at why you, as the employer, want to change the way the renumeration is calculated. It sounds to me like you are trying to some some other problem. Are the employees not putting in the hours? The commitment? Not delivering quality? Then the problem is likely to be you, the manager, rather than the way you calculate the money. Look carefully at your working environment, and check the three points I mentioned above:
Of these it sounds like you have the first one sorted out: your employees do not seem to have a problem with the amount of money, just with the way you want to calculate it.
The second point includes you, the manager, and the environment at large. How are you to work with/for? Is there a good working environment? Are people rewarded and recognised fairly and openly according to well-known expectations? Are you running a sweat-shop? You have to ask yourself these difficult questions.
The last one is hopefully self-explanatory. It is very hard to get people to be enthusiastic about mind-numbing work.
I hope some of these thoughts help. Good luck to you and to your employees!! (Sounds like you are going to need it.)
Hi!
I just started going contract after several years of salaried employment.
Fundamentally I was sick of being asked to work extra hours including some weekends just to deliver stuff to customers without being suitably recompenced.
I am not married and have no children so I am willing to weather a somewhat irregular cash flow for the flexibility it gives me. Some weeks I'm a slack bugger and don't get up 'til 10 other weeks I do 10hr days. The great thing is _I_ decide and I get paid for what I do.
I do value my time, I have a girlfriend, and to have work drag me away from seeing people and doing things I love, for little or know reward sucked, "thank you" is nice but its doesn't make my car go - petrol does and that costs money!
Barry Wimlett at endless dot co dot uk
The thing that can make salary a pain is when management starts to view your marginal cost as zero. In other words, they can heap as much work on you as they like, and it costs nothing extra. This is an obstacle to efficient management. Too often, they'll have you work on some old hardware that could be cheaply replaced, but to their eyes, you can fix it for free. You end up maintaining things that aren't worth maintaining. In the short run, they save some cash, but it inevitably means that something else gets dropped or delayed, and it's lousy for marale. But many PHB's think they're smart because it looks like they're getting something for nothing.
Hourly with a guaranteed minimum has always provided the proper incentives and delivered the best results, both for me and for the employers.
I work in IT for a Big Wallstreet Finance Company and we all get paid a salary, with bonus related to individual, firm, and industry performance. Seeems the standard, and I ain't complaining.
I was hired by a heavy-industrial company as a mainframe programmer. They quoted me an annual salary, but I am entered into all their systems as an hourly wage, and the hourly wage is shown on my semi-weekly direct deposit statement.
I get my pay based on a 37.5 hour week, not including lunches. I get "appropriate" breaks for coffee or whatever. The company covers jury duty, doctor visits, dentist, etc. I get time and a half for any hours between 7.5 and 11. I get double time over 11. I get 1.5X (double after 11)time for the second day I work on a weekend, even if I only came in for a short trouble call on the Saturday and worked 8 hours on Sunday.
With my current supervisor, I control my own hours. She takes my word for my net time per week, and I keep an Excel "timeclock" for my own tracking. If I don't feel like working, I can leave early. If I work late, I can "casually bank" in my own records, or formally file the overtime. For formal overtime, we choose once a year whether we will be collecting replacement time off (at the multiplied rate) or cash.
Why would I give this up for a "straight" salary?
Historically, hourly wages and timeclocks are used for unskilled labor, where the only contribution you make is your time. When you move up to a point where your skills or ideas are the basis for your pay, you move to a salary position.
Some industries value people as "professionals," but rely on the employees to work overtime. If this is the case, hourly (straight time) overtime is fair. It is an incentive to the worker, but not a penalty to the employer. As long as it is not abused, it works fairly well for 2-3 years. After that... people want to be on straight salary, and often avoid the overtime if possible.
Ultimately, though, if you are talking about skilled labor, you never really get more than a week's worth of productivity out of someone if they are working scheduled overtime... so in the end it is best if people only work a regular week except in crunch situations.
I can't understand people who want a salary because of security. Where is the security? If the company doesn't need you any longer, you'll get fired anyway.
What's more, after the first 2 months in the year, I could be out of a job for the rest of the year, because all my expenses are covered already.
What's more, the negotiations about pay are so much fairer, because you supply a market and several companies make you an offer and I tend to choose the company with the highest hourly rate. Why? Because the only thing you can be sure of is the rate they pay. Anything else are just promises.
Further, I only take projects in the line of my skills, or the skills I'm interested in. That's why I have a consistent experience in my field. I don't know one employee who has a consistent skillset, because employees are forced to do whatever job the company assigns them to, and get paid fsckall to do it.
Last, but not least, as a contractor you get to defend yourself against predatory taxes. There's always ways to avoid them. As an employee, the taxes are taken out of your salary, even before you had the chance to argue. I hate that.
Especially here in Europe, if you charge $120 inclusive of value added taxes, you end up with $25 as an employee. As a contractor you can organise your personal corporate structure and make sure that you pocket $90 instead of $25, or even more. It pays to pay your tax lawyer.
That's why a contractor usually end up with 3 times more money than the manager, not to mention the collegues-employees. In almost every project the company asks me if I'm interested to become a project manager on their payroll: no thanks, I like the money too much.
And then some people moan: but money is not everything...
But it is not a question of money! It's a question of principle! Companies only have one long-term goal: maximize their profits. Why should I help any company make money, if I'm not getting a fair share of the cake? And let the markets decide what that fair share should be.
I get paid hourly, but I know I'm an exception. It's definitely better though, especially for overtime purposes, since I feel you're really compensated directly for what you do. Also I'd like to disagree with whoever said being salaried means no timesheets - in order to bill companies in consulting, your employer still has to know how much time you've spent doing their stuff, so time reporting is usually a necessity either way.
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Just a correction to the above message. I meant contracting, not necessarily consulting. Anything that will let me work from any point on the globe where there is Internet access.
I'm on a salary, and wouldn't have it any other way. As it is, I can spend an afternoon, say, with a book on my lap, boning up on a subject which is only borderline relevant to my job. A current example is XML, which may become an important part of my area in the next 6 months, but at present is nothing to do with our current project.
It's work, and I deserve to get paid for it, but I can't see it going down very well in an "hourly pay" environment.
The culture here is "you have these jobs to do, and these nominal hours to do them in. You may browse the web all day and get the work done at night if you prefer it that way, but don't expect overtime. You may work your arse off for a short day, then go home at 4:30 if you prefer, as long as the work gets done." (oh, and we're expected to maintain core hours of 10:30-4:30; whether we work the remaining hours before 10:30 or after 4:30 is our decision.)
... if a customer problem comes up which involves working out of ours, *then* we get compensated with pro rata overtime.
--
In my last job, I was paid a salary. I had to travel a lot, and it was felt that fixed monthly pay was the easiest way to pay us. I was living in an expensive city (Dublin) and was just about managing.
Then my car got nicked...
There was no way I could replace it. As I was travelling so much there was no way I could moonlight to make extra cash. I was also having problems with not getting paid for losing an entire weekend travelling. So I quit.
I now work for an engineering firm (aircraft maint) where everyone except the very top level get paid a wage, with 1.5 time for evenings and sat morning, and double time after that. While I already had a better basic pay than the last job, I have earned all of that and almost half again already, since April!
Once you use an electronic time booking system, there are no issues with filling out time cards- all that is done just with a barcode swipe morning and evening.
Trust me, after seeing both sides of the coin, getting paid extra money for doing extra work is the only way to fly...
Just sort the commentlist after score and the fp's will end up on the bottom of the list (score 0) Shit happens, learn to live with it
I work for a telco, the data side. The voice side was hourly so they switched us also. (Everyone except the SysAdmins, Poor bastards...)
Salary had On Call pay which came out to about 4 hours of hourly pay. Hourly gets Time and a half, Double Time, and 2 Hour per incident pay.
We normally do 5-10 hours overtime a week, so hourly was a better choice.
We didnt want to switch, but now that most of us have, all those 1am maintence windows mean more $$.
Let's calculate that out. Let's start with a (low) salary of $30160, and the matching hourly wage of $14.50/hr.
:)
Salaried:
6 weeks salaried == $3480
Hourly:
(30*14.5)2 + ((40*14.5) + (30*21.75))4 == $5800
Stretch that out to yearly averages:
Salaried == $30160 (DUH
Hourly == $50266.67 (apprx.)
Now tell me again, which hurt your paycheck more? I guess it depends on spending habits. I say learn self control, and don't overspend in the weeks you bring home more. The advantages are (for me, this may not apply to you) cushion if there are lean periods, but since there are few (or were, I should say -- I work for myself now) that leaves surplus to A)pay off debt, or B)invest. When you take into account the effect of compound interest (on the debt OR the investment) the gap between salaried and hourly becomes even greater.
Hourly is way to go right now in The Netherlands, expecially on consultantcy/freelance basis.
Depending on a lot of factors (age, interests, future etc) of course one has to look at their own circumstances, but I just went from wage to hourly rate with a (roughly) 40%increase after tax.
In Holland above a certain rate you pay 54% tax, BUT car, hardware, courses, literature telefone lines etc are all part of production and therefore tax deductable, so you end up paying for what you need and for the rest adminster your secundary emplyment conditions. Off course once the economy goed down again you might be in trouble - but that goes also for waged people - except for a fuckoff bonus.
Main thing, the cost to my employer has remained the same. OK I pay my own holidays and health insurance - but again I pay for what I want instead of a standard package for a thousand people.
Dennis Onstenk
I just recently got a new postion a very large Bank (IO Department). My job current is that of sysop and sys developer (sysop only for 1 month). At first when i took this job I was pretty unhappy about the hourly thing, since i was the only on in the department that was on it. However it wasn't a big deal for me because I HAVE to work 40 hours, there is no way that I can work anyless since the system has to be monitored 24/7. Since after my first week here I have been putting in a sice ammount of hours (one week was over 90+). If i was salary I would be making about 25-40% less. I think hourly is a must if know your going to be working out of the 9 to 5.
-=Methodica=- -= Can An Artist Make It In the Linux World =-
Personally I am starting to get quite burned out on the notion that I work for some company or that a company somehow owns my talent or works. Unless of course the company is my own. I used to think that being "on the inside" gave more insight into the overall strategy and planning of the future and more control over whether success or failure ultimately ensued. Now I no longer believe that. I've seen too many companies with broken internal communication, lack of any real design or planning, and even very senior people feeling powerless to change much or even to have their input heard. To me, it is these things that are most important, especially in a fulltime regular employee situation. Empower your people, involve them, challenge them and regularly reward them. Whether they get time and a half for overtime is pretty irrelevant. I can get time and a half at McDonalds.
I'm a sys admin currently working in Norway. It's quite common here to be salaried and to have good overtime compensation. For example, in my companies case we get a very good salary and we get 1.5x compensation up until 21:00 and 2x compensation after that and on weekends.
What is even more interesting is that we also get the choice of taking the time instead of money or spliting it so that a % is taken as time and the rest as money.
We also get a quartely bonus...
Having said that, if I had to choose as you guys seem to have to I would go for the Salary option, mainly for the security. I know that contract workers (basically earning on an hourly rate) can have problems getting mortgages and the like (at least in europe) mainly due to the uncertain nature of their finances (at least in the banks eyes).
"Remember when Prestel/MicroNet 800 were big news and MUD still ran on a Dec/10 at Essex Uni? Then you must feel as old
Here in Japan the companies prefer to pay fixed salaries and fixed Bonus (twice a year, generally) But I would like the Bonus more representative of the dividends and more conforming to the volume of job that ones produce. In that case i'll not worry to much about overtime fare.
Incidentally contractors for the purpose of these rules are people who work for their own company which has a contract with the place they work at. In which case your own company is responsible for your vacation time.
In the past I've worked for a comapany that gave good overtime rates, and some people (not me) would slack it during the day and then come in at the weekend and earn extra, and get kudos for 'putting in the effort'. A salary (with no overtime pay, no pressure to do overtime) means the managament are responsable for setting reasonable deadlines, the staff get time for a social life / to sleep, and that, in theory, makes them happier and more productive.
Just my opinion...
In the UK computer games industry most companies pay a salary + bonus, but no overtime.
Thad
Thad
The problem with salaried staff is that they get paid the same for a 40 hour week, or 70. Employers often fall into the trap of "encouraging" their salaried workers to put in lots of extra hours. Big mistake. 1. The quality of work produced towards the end of a 70 hour week is very poor. 2. Your staff turnover will climb. Turnover costs big $$$, especially if key people leave close to a project deadline. I know, I've recently seen the entire project team I was working on leave (including me). We were just burnt out. It's far better to hire a few more people and work them reasonable hours. 7 people working 40 hours will cost the same as 4 people working 70, you'll get far better quality, and be far less vulnerable to losing key people.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
..I have an interest to declare. I'm a contract engineer and therefore I'm paid hourly, but I think there is something to be said for paying all staff in this way.
For one thing, contracts should recognise the extra stress imposed on their staff by working excessive hours by 1.5x/2x payments. This has the side effect of forcing management to ensure that the company employs enough people to do the job. If you are on a fixed salary without any overtime recognition whatsoever there can be a lot of pressure to do excessive hours and prove that you are a "team player". This can be quite common in small companies.
In Europe there is the "Working Time Directive" which effectively prevents workers being forced, or even wanting to work for excessive hours [can't remember what the limits are]. I believe a far more reasonable solution would have been to force people to pay overtime at such rates for hours over those contracted - this would have provided more flexibility and freedom of choice, whilst still placing a hurdle in the way of companies abusing employment regulation.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Im sure im not the only person who sees the main difference between different people with regards to the way they run their lives is how secure they feel in general. I think this applies well to the salary/hourly debate. Insecure people opt for salary, and take a $$ hit as a result, where more secure people tend to be more adventurous and reap the benifits! ...wether or not salary provides more security...
So I guess it's simple: hourly or salary just depends on the size of your schlong...;)
I don't recall exactly where I read this information, but IIRC:
...unless you work in data processing/information systems.
- Professionals are defined as people like lawyers and doctors. They aren't supposed to be paid overtime.
- Everyone else *IS* supposed to be paid overtime...
-
Some lobbying group got the US Congress to set up the laws to allow salaried IS/DP people to work overtime but not require them to be compensated for that work.
In any case, most employers don't want to pay overtime anyway.
In my own life, I just came out of a firm where I was working 50-60 hour weeks for the first three months of the job. "Comp time" wasn't intended to be used more than a week or two past the original overtime, and there was no way that I was going to be getting paid extra. I managed to salvage the project but there was no recognition of that fact, nor was there any increase in pay or compensation. This convinced me that if you're salaried, you have less incentive to actually do the work after a point--I'd get paid the same amount when I came in at 10am and left at 3:30pm as when I was coming in at 7am and leaving at 6pm.
I'm glad that I chose consulting and contracting. The firm I work for pays my W2, they let me bill hourly, and I get vacation. I also am compensated well enough that I could get by with less hours worked, but I get incentives for billing over 40. And the benefits are better than most of the traditional salaried positions would offer.
All in all, I think it's more fair to the employees and clients to only bill for hours worked. A salaried position is like a fixed price contract where you know how much money is coming, and if you work more or less hours, it doesn't make any difference. That's not a good contract for myself or my clients. I would much rather be fair to them and myself by billing for work done and only billing for doing nothing when I'm on the client's premisis, waiting for things to blow up or looking for things to fix.
Chris
Trying to wiggle around a lack of sufficient reward for your employees is pretty weak. The fault lies in the company, and as manager you're the one responsible to fight for an answer.
I'm assuming that you're proposing converting their existing salary directly to the equivalent hourly rate for a standard 8-hour day. If so, the only benefits of being paid one way of the other are when it comes to overtime. In my experience, unpaid overtime (as is common for salaried workers here in the UK) sucks. It becomes expected, and you end up having to work longer and longer hours for no pay. That really starts affecting staff morale, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a techie department. So basically, what I'm saying is, pay for overtime, for both salaried and hourly paid workers. Also, overtime should be treated as something extra -- your staff are doing you a favour by working over and above their normal hours, and should be paid accordingly. Jobs that pay overtime at the normal hourly rate similarly affect morale. Time and a half won't cost you that much extra, and it'll do wonders for morale.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I work as a "contractor" according to UK practice. Hourly paid freelance, but hired out on 3 month+ terms for fairly static contracts. If I wourk 41 hours, I typically bill it as the agreed 40, because there's management pressure not to have worked the extra hour in the first place. If I work 50-60 hours for weeks at a time, I bill it and get rich and exhausted.
Do I care between salary and hourly ? Not a bit of it -- I care far more about the other issues; the staff management culture, the project management culture, the nerd interest in the work and the quality of the office coffee. I often have great difficulty in finding my next contract; it's easy enough to find "a contract" and it's pretty easy to find the best paid contract (because that's all that the agencies see as significant). It's much, much harder to find a contract I'll be happy with; one that has a good atmosphere and interesting technical aspects.
As for security, salaries aren't secure anyway (these days). My security comes from a month's living expenses in the bank and a skillset that I keep up to date. I've worked in plenty of offices where the employed staff expressed horror at my "insecurity", then have found themselves downsized a month later.
Well, if this team is in the United States, then they have little choice in the matter. The federal government has stepped in and decided for us. If your compensation isn't equal to twenty-five and some change (I think thirty-three cents, I'm not sure), or you are not management, then you have to be paid hourly, with compensation for Overtime. The reason I know this is because I had just come from a Salaried position to a new company in January of this year. They quoted me an hourly figure, and when I questioned this, the HR person showed me the guidelines that she had concerning IT pay. I am not in a managerial position, so my slot is hourly,with overtime compensation. And, they also made it illegal to compensate IT (and only IT, as far as I know) with compensatory time in lieu of pay for overtime, or even on top of salaries. I think they are trying to stave off any attempts at unionizing the IT industry, as there have been some rumbling from out west. Boy, wouldn't the UAW like to get its' freedy paws on a percentage of OUR salaries. Just my 2 cents..it's a real balloon buster. If anyone has any further information other than the quick email I saw from the Corporate HR director to the satellite offices, I'd appreciate it.
If it's occasional overtime and an average 40 hour work week, I can go either way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
At [big hardware company], we use both. When people are first hired, they are hired through a contract agency, paid hourly. (No benefits paid directly by my company, we just pay the contract agency about 1.75* what the worker is getting paid.) After a while (anywhere from 3-9 months) the worker gets upgraded to direct hire. Then he/she is paid a salary (no overtime) with full benefits (read: stock options.) As for overtime? If it gets real bad (like around Y2K time,) there will be "fringe" benefits. Such as paid lunches/dinners, free trips (one guy was chosen to represent us as Comdex, so he was given a few extra days in Vegas, along with "spending money",) even free "product". (A coworker was given a new computer for working about 70 hrs/week for three weeks on a new project. Yes, the computer was fully loaded, probably worth around $2500-$3000.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
You write: The main difference is, that when employed, but being paid by the hour, you can have a guaranteed minimum nr of hours you can work. So there's not as much risk involved.
In this business, there is zero risk of not reaching that minimum number of hours. The risk is entirely in the other direction, ie. being massively overworked. And if this doesn't apply to your company then clearly it's not part of the computing and Internet explosion. Maybe it's time to move elsewhere.
The objections to working freelance are entirely bogus, basically fostered by the management of yesteryear that is averse to paying the higher rates of technically skilled people on today's open market --- in other words, substantially more than they themselves are earning as non-technical administrators.
Welcome to the new world guys, which is a *technical* one in which it is tech skills that are the more important and scarce ones, and in which admin & management is in massive oversupply. Times change. Your should have studied those boring sciences at school.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
An interesting question - I think contracters and
consultants ( like myself ) prefer hourly billing,
as I work 3 hours on salary for every 1 hour I bill.
I worked for a major IT company, salaried, with overtime compensation, but quit due to a high amount of nitpicking on the hours reported.
Also there were timesheets and all that crap - get's kinda boring to fill out a timesheet for an hour and 15 mins work that the company bills $150 for and then get hassled about those 15 mins.
My rule of thumb when doing salaried work is that an hour of overtime I work for a client I write down and want compensation for, an hour of overtime looking into an interesting question, installing some fun software on my ws etc. I don't ask compensation for.
Another good rule is - make the workplace a fun place to be, get rid of timesheets unless you need them.
So far, what I've seen on this board is:
* Some people like salary because of security, lack of pressure
* Hourly wage, on average, is more lucrative for the employee
* Contractors usually receive hourly wage, and are seen sometimes as "mercenaries"
* Stock options/Bonuses are usually considered "extra" unless the company is a startup
* Corporate culture, or social setting is important, but hard to quantify in $$.
For the poster:
What kind of work is involved, and what kind of company are you? If it is highly research-oriented (find out how to optimize network activity, design a new algorithm to ), then I would strongly recommend salary/bonus, as the work is not easily quantifiable, but the results are.
If you are a startup (looking to IPO sometime soon), stock options are *very* appealing. Note, however, that unless you see your stock doing very well, the options often cause more contention than they are worth. Touchy subject.
If the work your employees perform is fairly quantifiable (ie, Joe spent 50 hours at work this week, so he performed 25% more work than Suzy, who worked the standard 40), then hourly wage is appropriate, and recommended.
Regarding overtime, I see this as independent of the whole salary/hourly thing. If you expect your average employee to work overtime, they you better well *pay* for it. preIPO Startups pay with stock options; privately owned co.'s who are not going public for some time should pay with overtime. NOTE: well managed overtime benefits are clearly visible to the employee and will result in lower degree of turnover.
On the other hand, if you are not so concerned about turnover, you can afford to be mrPHB here.
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What I've never understood is why alleged supporters of the free market are happy with business costs and rewards being governed by supply and demand, and yet for some odd reason they feel that if they do the same it's predatory.
It's easy to see why employers sometimes encourage that view, but the technical community needs to see beyond it. It's a technical world now, it is *your* skills that are of utmost importance to your (presumably hi-tech) company, and there is no reason in the world why you should be earning less than a member of the Board of Directors --- top technical competence assumed, of course.
Anyone can push paper, but few can do our work. Why shouldn't your income reflect that?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Although I am an exempt, salaried employee, if I work 20 hours in a week, I am paid half my normal salary. If I work 80 hours in a week, I am paid my normal salary. The result is that in practice I am paid on an hourly basis, unless my hours exceed 40 per week, in which case I only get paid for 40 hours.
I would rather get paid on an hourly basis, with premium pay for overtime, weekends and holidays. It is too easy for managers to abuse salaried employees with excessive or expected overtime requirements. I have seen situations where the company demanded a certain amount of weekly overtime from every employee without having to pay for it.
My father has a real salaried job, he doesn't fill out time sheets and can work as much or as little as is needed to get the job done.
Im a tech at a large web hosting company. Our company has recently decided that salaried employees will be docked pay if they do not work a minimum of 40 hours a week, yet somehow they wiggle out of paying more for those people who pay overtime. Has anyone else heard of this? Is it legal?
I know this company who gets their programmers (who are salaried) to do sick amounts of overtime because of stupid scheduling on the mgmt's part, doesn't pay them for extra overtime and promises stock (but nothing in writing), and pays them VERY MUCH under the industry average. Result: Just about every single programmer in the place is about to quit. Morale is the lowest I've seen at any company.
Don't let that be your mistake... Don't be afraid to compensate people for their work, salaried or by hourly rate. Most people will be happy as long as they feel appreciated and are reasonably well paid for their effort. (Remember that if overtime isn't compensated (and starts becoming expected instead of appreciated), the employee is essentially getting PUNISHED for the more effort they put into their job. If they're salaried and end up doing large chunks of overtime every other week, be reasonable (give them a few extra vacation days, tell them to not come in tomorrow... a little bonus now and then, just so they know their effort is noticed and appreciated. Worst off, TELL THEM
in France, some companies as mine, have negociated the "35 H law" as one or two day vacation by month ,12 or more hours. Sometime we are to work until 23h.
All the others days, we work 8, 10
the target is to make the job done.
And the job is done and well done
I think this is a very good arrangement. We have the time to do something else than programming, now ! the time to live !
I think this is more important than to do a max of $ with a hourly payment.
Clearly there is no set right or wrong answer here. These are all based on personal experienced with various companies. What all of this comes down to is the quality, fairness, and honesty of the company that you work for. Sure you can get screwed on salary by having to work crazy hours without appropriate conpensation. But this only happens when you are working for a company that just sucks and doesn't give a shit about their employees. Or maybe when working for a start-up, but in that case you should most definitely be compensated in stock.
In my own case, salary sucked. But more specifically, the company I worked for just plain sucked. I was working long hours, without OT compensation and was only receiving an average salary for someone with my skills. When all my friends were receiving salary + OT compensation. I felt extremely cheated. Then they started having me travel entire weekends without monetary compensation or compensation time. I specifically asked about this exact issue in the interview, and was told by the same person that told me I wasn't going to be compensated for the weekends that weekend travel would never happen in my job. I can't begin to tell you how BAD IT SUCKS to come in on a Monday morning when you just fly in from a weekend work trip at 11pm the prior evening. When I mentioned this to my boss, he said that none of the others that I was travelling with were asking for compensation. But the others I was travelling with were all the fucking owners of the company!
In the future it's salary + OT or hourly. Straight salary is insane to me at this point, and I know of VERY FEW people who get really large salaries without being required to work long hours to match. As for the "we get paid so much" crap. Lose it! Sure we get paid very comfortably. But people in other industries get paid just as well. Hell, many of us with less experience get paid less than truck drivers. Also, we need to also consider how much money we are generating for our companies. Most times it's rather a lot, and with the way things go these days IT staff are now required just to survive and are hardly a luxury item.
Salary is better and will get better performance out of MOST employees. However, an unnamed company for which I work and am paid salary, has the wrong idea. You are docked pay for not working 40+ hours a week (weather or not you make the time up) and do not get overtime for anything over 40 hours a week. This makes for VERY unhappy employees.
Whichever model you take, a lot of the consequences come down to the quality of management in the place where you work. In many cases, the fixed-rate salary will be abused (as will per-day contract rates), but a good manager will seek to reward employees for extra effort, whether that be financially, hierarchically or otherwise. Hourly rates and a clock-watching culture are, in my personal opinion, only suited to short-term or low-skill assignments. It fails to encourage a 'work smarter, not harder' ethos, and often leads to employees abusing the system by claiming for more hours than worked, feeling justified in doing so through the effort they have put in relative to colleagues. If you want to regulate the situation, in the case of long-term careers, a fixed salary with overtime payments (where approved in advance), share options and regular appraisals works far better than a clock-watching system better suited to data entry clerks and shop assistants (both jobs I have done...)
Every time I worked salaried in the US I got screwed. The companies piled on the workload until we were pushing 80 hours per week average. This happened at three different places in and around Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Compared to contract work the salaries and bonuses were a friggin' joke!
The first year I went contract my hours were nearly halved, my salaried more than doubled, and I was able to pick and choose from a variety of interesting projects. Quite a nice change.
I worked as a programmer for a year.
I had salary + overtime compensation.
Social securities based on salary.
OK for me. I think that what it's like for most people in Sweden.
I once had a summer job that paid $300/week to fix hardware. It beat flipping bugers, however I ended up working 70h/week. Come on that's below freaking minimal wage. I get paid better now, however I still don't see a dime more if I work 70h or sprint towards the door at 5:00PM. However you better believe they would fire my ass if the project didn't get done. There are easier ways to make 7$/hour which it turns out to be. It doesn't take long to get sick of working weekends or untill 3:00AM and not getting paid for it. I won't be around at this job for long.
I am an hourly contractor for a major pharmaceutical company and I'm simply not allowed to work overtime. If I'm 'in the zone' on a Tuesday and code for 12 hours straight, I'm expected to knock off early on Friday. By the same token, if I need to spend Monday morning at the dentist's office, I should find a way to squeeze those missed hours back in. That's not to say I don't ever take work home with me, but that's simply a matter of pride and I'm rarely that proud.
I have seen the flip side of this - as an (ugh) NT sysadmin for a 7/24 health care company in Denver, we were routinely expected to work weekends, come in at midnight, all without additional compensation. I moved.
I guess my point is, you can't say over 40 is the norm. There are as many different styles of workplaces as there are different types of workers. Who cares what's the best method of compensation? The question should be, are you satisfied with your compensation. If not, there's never been a better time to find another job.
(name withheld by request)
I'm on salary, with no possibility of overtime. This may seem like a rip off to some people, but I also have a condition in my contract which states that I have no set amount of hours I have to actually be at work during a week period, AND I do not have set office hours.
:-)
Basically, if I don't have anything scheduled, and if nothing breaks, I don't have any reason to go in to work that day. I can go in a 3pm and leave at 5pm, and that's a full day's work for me!
I've been salaried most of my career, and just recently started hourly contracting. So there's really three options here, which are being intermingled: salaried employee, hourly employee, and hourly contract. I'll never go back to being an employee, because (a) I have a contract, which means I can't get sacked because the PHB has a bad hair day, and (b) the "benefits" typically given by an employer have never "benefitted" me in the slightest.
I am a systems engineer at a computer admin firm. We admin about %50 of the networks around our small city, and I end up working 70-80 hours a week. I am on salary and I get screwed... overtime is minimal and the salary is not all the great either, I would love to get paid by the hour, I would be making almost double what I do now. The problem seems to be that the market is really flooded with so called "admins" that get out of a low grade IT school (that we admin, because the instructors of the ADMIN courses can't even admin their own network!!) and only know how to create users and load MS Office, my boss uses the fact that he can replace us for cheap as leverage to keep our salary down. I would love to get paid when I work till 7AM restoring a PDC... oh well.
It doesn't matter if you are hourly or salary, you will still get screwed.
At the consulting firm I work for, and many others in this city (Omaha, NE), we get a 'hybrid' style. I'm paid salary at a good rate. This includes benefits on top, paid bench time, and vacation/holiday pay. For overtime, we am paid by the hour at whatever my salary/2080 comes out to. This amounts to straight time for overtime, but we do get paid.
This means I have a minimum check amount that increases when I work more hours. The client pays straight time for my services above 40 hrs. All told, I love this arrangement, and I have been both salary(exempt from overtime) and hourly with time+1/2 for overtime.
Actually, for consultant/contractors, I'm surprised this is not more standard.
i despise the notion of salary. it gives me no incentive to do anything. i want to get paid for the hours i work, overtime if i put in extra time. i don't want a bonus at the end of the project - i don't really give a care about that.
:)
by the same token, i don't want to get paid for the hours i don't work. my time is my own, and i truly do not appreciate other people who waste my time. if i don't feel like i'm needed at work, i don't want to be there - i have better things to do.
the wage that i'm being paid should be sufficiently high to make me happy to work there. if i'm not happy, i'll screw you around. be generous with my pay, and i'll be generous with my effort. i am NOT the type of person who is grateful to be employed. i'm providing a service, and i expect to be paid for it.
pretty simple, eh?
-blarg
-- familiarity is only skin deep
I pay for benefits on my own. For $150 a month I have health via BCBS. For $50 a month, my $200K (big for my area, may suck in your area) house is covered if I die. I put a min of $600 a month away for retirement. Since I've passed 30, I'm think about short- and long-term disability insurance now. Since I'm generally healthy and don't have a family, this works out very well for me. Now that I'm getting married (next year) I'll probably look for something more stable with better all around benefits (but still in the 6 figures).
However, I'm only 'on the bench' for a day or two before another company picks me for a contract. So I'm not really sure if a salaried position will provide better stabality.
I think I prefer hourly over salary mainly because I have more freedom and I get paid for the number of hours I work. Freedom because I can choose the health benefits I want and I can spend my money the way I want, etc (but taxes sure eat alot of my income). Freedom because I know I'll be on another project with a different company in a month's or year's time. Freedom because I get to travel - I work 3000 miles away for a couple of months, fiance watches house, finance visits me once or twice a month (plane tickets can get expensive though). I also like getting paid for everything I work. If I'm salaried at the average or just above the 'market' salary I only expect to work 40 hours. So I'm not going to work weekends. Salary is just that, 30 or more hours. Raise the salaries (to at least $20K above average) and say 45 or more hours (just to be honest), I might be tempted.
The problem with raising salaries is that many salaried employees are dead weight. At least were I have contracted, many just sit around and surf all day and really don't have a clue to what's going on. To me that is what salaried means: I become incompetent. Obvisouly, this is a flawed observation on my part, because many ppl here on /. are competent, yet are salaried.
So in the end, salary is better for me, at least in pre-marriage version of myself.
I think you are a good manager for even carring about your ppl. So I would let your ppl decide what they want. If you can do it on an individual level that would be great. If not, then let the majority rule.
Here in the Netherlands you get paid overtime, or if you don't, there is a maximum of hours you may work overtime. I myself don't get any overtime, so I don't work overtime.
I don't like projects to fail on me not working overtime, but the deadlines I have to achieve are always pushing me to work-longer. We usually have work for about ten people, doing it with just three. Meanwhile the boss accepts new orders and just plans it in as the Customer likes it best. Usually we don't like it.
The stress at my firm is continues and the pressure is continuesly up.
I don't want projects to fail on me not working overtime, but I won't work longer before there is any attempt to make better plannings. Secondly, if I work harder, I'm not rewarded, so the system is like the communism - so I won't work hard!
The situation doesn't statisfy my very much, and for an employee in the IT business, I can get another job any time, and that's exactly what I'm going to do!
Anyone in the IT-business can get a new job anywhere anytime, so you don't have to buy it to get the feeling you're underpaid.
Bizar technology?
I've been both and it depends on the situtation... And being managment that it is and trying to spend their money as wisely as possiable we all know the situation. Whenever I've been a salary employee it seems I have to be on call w/ pager, come in on weekends, eat sleep drink breath the project. And basically get screwed in general. Though time off is paid, etc. But I hardly ever get it when I have it. Now that I'm a hourly consultant I hardly am ever asked to do OT and work anything beyond 9-5. I find my self being more concious if how I spend my time at work, etc. I get paid a pant load more now though. I hate timesheets but the great trade off is that they NEVER even think of asking me to work OT, now that I would love to. I myself after weighing the pro's and con's love being hourly... Mo' money and less work.
I've been paid both a salary and hourly as a full-time employee, plus I've been paid hourly as a consultant.
:)
I prefer hourly because if some idiot decides to ask you to work longer you get paid for your time. Yes, many places promise comp time (aka time off), but few actually give you that comp time. Even fewer give you comp time on a one to one ratio of extra hours worked to hours taken off. That said, the down side of hourly is that if you don't work you don't get paid. So taking those long lunches isn't an option.
One the other hand, if you are trying to work your way up in your company, I guess you should go salary and expect to be overworked without compensation. Given how often we technical people change jobs I think playing the career ladder game at a single company is a foolish move. Which is why I prefer to be a consultant paid by the hour. Your job changes are an expected part of your career.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
It seems most folks prefer salaries because of the security.
...
Salaries are bullshit. For every one fair salaried jobs there are a dozen others that ask plenty of overtime with no or very poor compensation
If you are selling your labor an hourly wage makes the most sense. Unions are the only legitimate way to provide security in your workplace. It shocks me how anti-union americans are, they are absolutely neccessary within capitalism as a democratizing force, otherwise, you just have greedy diskweed CEO's running roughshod over everyone. "Lean times" is a lame excuse when the "economy" is supposedly "booming" and bosses christmas bonuses exceeds the combined salaries of this years lay offs (and this is just typical). People need to protect themselves. It is quite typical that companies treat labor as about the first thing to cut when they are a little financially inconvenienced. This crap needs to stop. They need to consider labor a commodity like any other thing they buy. You anti-union people are way too brainwashed. Unions are the only answer. People must organize.
support gun control: take guns from cops
#define salary NO_OVERTIME
#define hourly OVERTIME
Several people here have made the statement, "I like being salary because if I spend the afternoon reading
Now, if you are hourly, the following good things happen:
At my first job as an software engineer, I was salary non-exempt (work 40 hrs/week, get paid overtime). My project was seriously underestimated (happened before I was hired), and I worked 75+ hour weeks for about three months. Fresh out of college, I was taking home (after taxes) $2500 every two weeks (and this was twelve years ago). This had two distinct benefits: I had lots of money to pay off my loans with, and no time to spend it on anything else!
Now, some people say, "But what if I work 30 hrs this week, and 50 next week?" That's where a smart company will introduce compensation time (comp time). You can place some time into the comp time bank, and take it back out later, or take it as overtime. Ususally, companies that do this and also pay overtime have you get comp time for working 50.
In my opinion, the only time pure salary exempt makes sense is when it is very difficult to determine when you are working. Example: If you are an artist for a company, and you go for a hike in the woods for inspiration. Are you working? Do you bill those hours? Or if you are a CEO, and you go golfing and lunching with some VC's to fund the expansion of your engineering department. How do you bill those hours? In those cases, salary makes sense. But if you can clearly document when you work (even if it is at weird times like most I.S. folks have to work) then you should be hourly.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've always worked salary, and I actually prefer it. Here's the way I look at it:
1. With salaray, I know exactly how much I'm getting every pay check. This is a great help in balancing the budget. I don't have to worry about the 'I missed a days work, I'm out of vacation days, so I'll be short x amount this paycheck' headache.
2. While I do miss out on overtime, I've always got compensated in other ways. With this company, I get a yearly bonus, which is more than what the hourly employee's get, due to the fact that I don't get overtime. With companies in the past, I have gotten comp. Time. I actually prefer comp time, as it can give me 'added' vacation days.
I think I may be in the minority here, as I'm not a coder, but a systems administrator/engineer. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that with my choosen branch of IT/IS, I may work more hours than my app dev/programming conterparts, but it's always been made up to me on the back end.
I'll stick with working salary for the immediate future, as I do enjoy the steady paycheck (ref point 1) and the comp time is good for me.
Of course your milage may vary.
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
Advantage: Paid for what you work Still get sick and vacation days Get paid 1.5X OT Still get medical, dental, etc Disadvantage Paid for what you work Have to fill in those timesheets I definitely think I'm getting the tasty deal. I don't have a huge variance in hours worked per week, so the check is usually about the same anyway. The security I enjoy is linked more to my performance and the market than it is to the payment method.
XeoMage
I work and charge on a daily basis - means I don't have to punch a clock, but can work a day here and a day there pretty flexibly
I get both, and if they messed with it I'd never work an second of OT...I can be replaced but not easily or quickly. What about COMP time ???
Also, do not try to pressure people into putting in overtime. Other than the obvious legal implications, it's really bad form and an easy way to lose good employees (there are other tech opportunities out there, ya know). People will generally put in overtime when it's necessary, but this should be of their own volition.
Martin
I am astounded by what you write about contractors. One of three things must have happened: either (i) contractors are different where you work [I can't believe that, since you're in the UK]; or (ii) you have had a huge number of awful experiences, in which case you must fire your supply agencies immediately (and sue them for being incompetent if you have a large legal department), and think about severely questioning the people who interviewed those contractors as they must have been deaf, blind and probably dumb; or (iii) you don't have enough skills to freelance yourself, you have a massive inferiority complex as a result of it, and you lie to boot.
In my fairly extensive career as a contractor, I have known several hundred others, as well as several hundred permanent colleagues. Of the contractors, maybe 2 were incompetent, and maybe 5 were 9-5 people to whom it was just a job. The number of permanent staff I have known in both of these categories is in the many dozens.
With very minor exceptions, in all those places I have worked (mainly large computer and communications companies), contractors behave as professionals, and very competent ones. If your experience is different then something is very, very wrong.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm a little surprised that in so many posts no one has mentioned that the law is fairly clear about who is exempt from overtime requirements and who is not. Specifically, computer professionals making less than $27.63/hr *must* be paid time-and-a-half for hours >40 in a work week. And contrary to what seems to be common belief here, hourly employees may be given holidays, annual/sick leave, etc., it's just not required by law (not required for salaried employees either). http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/statutes/wh d/0002.fair.pdf has the full story (the part about the computer professionals is on page 18). Of course, lots of employers ignore this law. But if you're caught, you'll have to pay the overtime back two years not only to the employee who complained, but to *all* the employees who should have been getting overtime and weren't.
I'm a coop at Intel. I'm getting paid hourly right now which is nice, but real engineers are on salary. Being young, I still don't see benefits of salary if any. People who work salary at Intel do not get paid overtime. There was a possibility that some people in my group would have to come to work on Thanksgiving, and if they did have to, they wouldn't get any overtime. I guess it all depends on the company's other benefits though. Most people I see work at least 10 hour days. Which when you consider the pay isn't all that great. But then again the stock options are good. So in a way that would even out working your ass off and not getting paid any more than someone who is working an 8 hour day.
I've worked at places where everyone watched the clocks and was a strict 8:30-5:30 shop. I've also worked at places that had so much overtime that I bought a new ACURA just with the overtime pay. I felt a wee bit better about all those hours after I hopped in my new car.
If its a regular shop then salary is nice. If its a sweatshop then hourly is better for all concerned since it keeps morale high (and so productive).
Thanks
Up here in Alaska there's two types of "salary" - either salaried or exempt. Salaried means you get $X per year for 40-hour weeks (or 50 or whatever your 'normal' hours are); if you work more you get paid more, if you work less you get paid less. Exempt means you get $x per year for X hours per week; if you work more or less it's irrelevant - you still get the same. Difference between hourly and salary is in benefits. Hourly requires NO benefits (although usually there's some sort of benefits involved), while salary has 401(k), medical, etc.
My position is all either hourly or exempt; I'd kill for salaried! I'm very, very tired of hearing "you're exempt - that makes you a highly paid professional" when asked to work extra hours. (FTR I make about $8k under average for my work. Last year they redefined my work to exclude any paperwork, then used the remaining duties to classify my "average peer's salary" in a lower category...The state also had that "highly paid professional" clause under exempt for quite a few years, which is where it originated.)
My girlfriend does similar work for another company and is salaried. Salary is ~$2/hr less than I make, gets same benefits, net pay is about 10%-20% higher due to her employer paying for overtime worked...
I am a salaried employee of a company, and also do some consulting (in another industry) on the side.
My company pays all employees a salary. We still have timesheets for customer billings. If you work more than 40 hours a week, the excess is carried for six weeks during which you can use it as comp time. After six weeks the extra hours expire. Customers are billed pro rata (e.g. 40/60 your rate for customer A and 20/60 for customer B if you work 40 on one job and 20 on the other, ignoring comp time for the moment).
This works real well for us. We have a very strong culture that prevents driving anyone (except yourself) too hard. Pride in the quality of our work product keeps just about everybody working to make commitments.
As a consultant, I generally bill hourly rates. Some services -- particularly when I am working with a new client -- may be fixed price.
In both cases, the customer pays an agreed rate for smart folks (or me ;-) to think on their behalf. The mechanism for trickling a portion through to me differs, but not substantially.
The nature of the mechanism doesn't make much difference to me ... I work until I'm done and do my utmost to finish the job defined in the time (read $) estimated and with the quality promised.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
I seem to be in the excellent position of getting a (quite) good salary and every overtime hour paid (100% before 19.00, 150% until 20.00 and 200% between 20.00 and 6:00 and on weekends). We used to write down the arriving/leaving times but now we have a card and a terminal where this is done automaticly.
My boss now wants to change my slary into an "all-inclusive" one which has around 20 hours overtime included. Im not shure if I will accept this but in our company all-inclusive-workers are specially promoted (your salary raises faster and you get a bigger bonus if there is one...). Its the first step to approach the managing-league.
Gery
------------------------------
The answer is yes, me.
Netscapers work their butts off for 'normal' salaries, get good to vgood incentives and perks. But when semi-annual review comes along, OPTIONS are the real bonus. If your boss knows you're good, and that you've been an excellent part/leader of your team, then you should expect a very nice grant notice by quarter/semi/year end.
It beats the heck out of more pure cash, because you can leverage options - and then they vest.
Again, you don't explain much about your company's structure, but here's how it's worked where I work. I am a "sales nerd" so I get sales bonuses & a small amount of options.
At my company we start Network Admins with or without certification (but with at least a year experience) at around $40K US salary, then we earn time-and-a-half for any time over 40 hrs. a week.
I had some stupid "This doesn't seem like a salaried position anymore" attitude at first, then realized that it meant I was bringing home almost $10,000 more this year and got over that real quick!
I work for a financial firm in NYC as a software developer. My manager divides the work up pretty evenly among the members of the group. I finish my projects on schedule, and they tend to be stable and not have many problems. Some of my co-workers have to work 10-12 to finish their projects on time. Sometimes they have to stay at work for 16 hours or so to fix a major bug that turned up in some of their code. If we were paid hourly, these co-workers would be making significantly more than me for taking a really long time to produce low quality programs.
I'm sure it's just my "been-there, done-that, been-burnt" cynic's attitude but I always quail when I hear someone mention "milestones" and "caring about the project".
I think that pride and a care for the project are incredibly important but most of the efforts I've seen to inculcate these feelings from above have been painfully condescending and have ended in failure.
I'm much more motivated by trust and respect and challenge.
I've done some of my best work when I've been given some room & bitten off more than I could chew --- and then tried to do it anyway.
When you get paid a salary, you aren't just getting paid a direct equivalent of an hourly wage. If you are offered a job with a salary based on the above formula, run, don't walk to the next potential employer.
In my particular case, as a salaried employee I'm compensated extremely well, even though I get nothing(but gratitute, and an increase in my "future earnings potential") for overtime. It's just factored into the salary. Then on top of that, there's the added benefits of job security, stocks, insurance, retirement, etc.
--GnrcMan--
Your experience may also have been the result of unwillingness to pay the market rate for quality contract staff. If you pay rates close to the bottom of the scale (which is still more than permanent staff get -- that's how the market works in this time of scarcity), you should expect less than top-notch excellence. Don't even bother offering less than 40 UKP/hr in the Internet area for example if you're looking for all-round competence, or 30 UKP/hr for good skill in any one subdiscipline. Rather than offering bottom rate, you'd be better off getting college dropouts, often good value because quite a few probably ended up playing with computers instead of studying.
The other possibility that comes to mind is that you've been hiring through cowboy agencies. You get what you pay for in agencies as well. A well-reputed agency will try to maintain that reputation, even to the extent of immediately replacing someone that hasn't come up to scratch. But it's important that you make it known to them that you are seeking top professional staff -- write it into your contract with them, so that *they* have to sort out the mess on your behalf should you ever have another such disastrous experience. Don't let them get away with supplying sub-standard placements, even in times of shortage.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As a contractor in the same company:
And the list goes on...
For me the choice between being a contractor vs. a salaried employee is a no brainer. I think anyone that does a good job would find that choice easy.
I know that the question was salaried vs hourly, and that hourly is not neccessarily being a contractor. But contractors ALWAYS are hourly, so I think the comparison might illustrate what an employe might gain if they go hourly instead of salaried.
and today and yesterday, as well as all other holidays, are paid double time and a half. Can't beat that.
I used to be paid salary. Then my company went under, and I had enough of pouring myself into companies only to get screwed. I've been playing the start up game way too long, and I have had my fill of long hours with only the promise of compensation.
I now do contracting--i.e. I'm paid by the hour. Disadvantages: I get no "paid" vacation, I pay my own benefits, I'm not as much a part of a team anymore, my job changes quickly in a year. Advantages: I get paid a lot more than what I was getting paid at my last job, I get paid for every single little hour I work. Then there is quality of life issues. Time off, working from home, variety of jobs (important for mne: I get bored easily), isolated from company politics, etc. Also, all of you working on salary, please raise your hands if you worked over 40 hours last week. Oh, all of you did? Did you get any compensation for working those hours?
Now before someone comes down on me about the security of salary, etc. please know that it took me a loooooong time to finally pick up contracting. I was scared about being out of work or not meeting my bills. You definitely have to be of the right frame of mind to do contracting. But I'd like to tell you that a lot of your fears are simply unfounded.
Try this little math trick:
(Annual Salary)+(Benefits: Medical, Life)--------------------------------------
(Average # hours/week) * (50 weeks)
That's your current hourly rate at your salaried position. Now try this. Snoop around the news groups for hourly rates. Then use this math trick:
(Average # hours/week) * (hourly rate) * (40 weeks)That's your approximate salary with contracting. I'm sure you will be shocked by how little you actually make with regular salaried positions. Notice, I only put in 40 weeks. Sometimes you spend two weeks or more between jobs. That's why its 40 instead of 50. You'll notice that you still make more, and you are getting more time off. The idea is that all the money is given to you upfront, instead of being hidden behind supposed benfits.
For those of you scared by the taxes issues or finding work, there are many, many contracting firms out there that find the work and will take you on with W2s. Then they take care of paying your taxes, just like your salaried job would have. You just have to come up with the benefits. That's what I'm currently doing. Even after taxes, I was dumb founded at how much I made compared to my last salaried job.
One last thing: the concept of getting paid for every hour you work is very, very powerful. Be warned. Once you start getting paid for each hour, it is very hard to go back to salary!
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Whether or not someone gets paid hourly or on salary should depend upon whether or not the work that they do can be measured by the hour. For development work, I would never pay by the hour because at the end of the development process, what you want to wind up with is a pile of source code, not a pile of hours. You have to trust your employees to pace themselves through a project so as to produce the most work in least time. For those jobs that require the employee to put in a certain amount of time, like answering tech support calls, paying by the hour is appropriate because the work product for that job is a collection of hours in which tech support is available.
On the other hand, if a boss is dumb enough to enforce a minimum overtime policy on his developers, as one of my bosses once did, (we were required to work 60 hours per week at no increase in pay,) then an hourly rate, with overtime ("comp time" being unlawful in Texas at that time) and all the trimmings, is probably required by law. You should consult with an attorney specializing in employment issues in that case. IANAL, but it is my understanding that you can run afowl of minimum wage laws if your workers work by the hour, but aren't paid by the hour. I have been told by Texas Workforce Commission people that the category of "exempt" employee is not determined by what the company says, but by how they treat the employee.
One other thing, if you are going to pay salaries, then it's probably not a good idea to require timesheets. I had a job that required timesheets from their exempt employees so that they could bill the customers for contract work. In that case, it is probably better to have at least some time-based component to encourage timely and accurate recordkeeping.
Ah, but then we enter the foggy realm of "work speed". Simply charging for (and paying for, if you're a customer) flat hourly rates completely ignores the concept of value-for-money.
This is an old problem -- how do we charge for the work we do?
Anybody with some bright ideas?
I like to actually work, not track what I am doing every hour. I worked for hourly wages before and it was a hassle. Timesheets, billable hours, all tha crap. You can keep it.
Now I'm a salaried employee and I have a good amount of autonomy. Nobody asks me how many hours I work, or tracks my vacation time. If I'm sick, I don't go in to work. It is refreshing to be treated with respect instead of being 'nickle and dimed' on every turn.
However, I think it's a corporate attitude that dictates these things. I also have no problem getting new hardware, working from home, or having people do my travel for me. Anything that enables me to perform my job more efficiently is fair game. In that same light, the salary seems much more attractive to me.
And I don't think I would switch even if it meant a pay raise...
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
The main difference between the salaried worker and the hourly worker is that the salaried one usually believes he or she is a professional and not a tradesperson/artesan. This is a common (mis)belief of the programming art, as well as engineers, managers, etc.
I have the fortune of knowing various people involved in telecom, such as troubleshooters, network designers, etc., mostly working for Bell Atlantic. These people work hard to avoid promotion, where they would be given management responsibilities and a salary instead of their hourly wage. They seem to like the fact that they can put in extra hours in November and then have a sizable paycheck and the flexibility to take extra time off for the Christmas season.
I have also worked where everyone was on salary, and there was a sad little time compensation package that never panned out to good stuff. If you put in overtime, you would receive "comp time", or paid hours off, which you were culturally expected not to take, especially after you racked up several weeks of it.
I personally liked having a consistent paycheck. It made planning easier, and my hours were erratic to say the least. I also have trouble remembering to fill out my timecards.
In general, I think money is the most limiting factor of business. To answer your question, I think that you may do well to provide both options, and just notify your employees that they have choices. Or, better, you could sit your employees down in a room and have them design the compensation package and its options. I'm sure that the result would be reasonable.
I ran my own computer consulting business for over 15 years and saw many examples at clients sites of salaried workers being exploited merely for the priviledge of not filling out a time sheet and having a fixed income.
After retiring my business I was asked to come to work for my present employer. I am paid hourly, with 1.5 time over 40 or on weekends and double time on holidays. The sick leave and vacation package are important, as is the health benefit.
Equally important is the flextime benefit. We don't punch clocks, all we have to do is get in our 40 hours sometime between Monday at 6:30am and Friday at 6:00pm. Flextime is on the honor system, and we don't cheat either. Other employees would know and resent it if an individual was consistantly working less than 40 hours. News would soon leak back to management and the offending individual would loose flextime previledges, if not their job. Salaried folk don't have to make up missed hours, but if they consistantly miss too many hours they, too, can lose their job. Flextime is a great benefit. It allows me to visit the doctor, get glasses, pick up kids, meet the wife for a long lunch, or do many other things that would be impossible because some things can only be done during business hours. I am much more supportive of company policies when I can see that they are supportive of me.
As far as filling out a time sheet - I wrote the software that makes timesheet generation almost automatic. If one hasn't been sick or hasn't taken a vacation during the last two weeks then a few clicks of the mouse generates the necessary documents. A programmer who can't write software to eliminte the drudgery of office work is worth their wage or salary - and neither is a salaried manager who can't think to use a canned payroll program either.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
IT professionals can really get jerked around if their employer wants to classify them as a service provider. According to WI state law, certain types of workers (damn near all of 'em) do not have to be paid overtime wages. As such, everyone inside my company who is full time is paid salary, and depending on your position you are required to work between 43 and 48 hours a week.
In every state I have worked many salaried employees are also entitled to overtime pay for working more than 40 hours in any calendar week. (and as I recall, in California any work beyond 8 hours in a single day is OT). As far as I know, the only really "exempt" salaried employees were actualy managers and executives. Secrataries, technicians, etc. were all due OT pay. Also, don't let your employer pull BS like trying to calculate OT over a two week period, or a one month period.
I get the hour deal. IMHO it is the way to go if you are planning to do a lot of OT. I do a lot of OT so for me it werks. Others may vary.
00 FF
I work for a funded eCommerce company. I get paid salary (and great benefits) as well as I get 5% of what I bill (my billing rate is 175$/hr) if I bill >= 100 hours/month || 10% (!!!) if I bill >= 150 hours/month (almost impossible). No I cant bill every hour at work and it seems that I usually work 15-35% more than I bill - so if I bill 100 hours I usually have worked 115-135 hours that month - still pretty nice bonus. NOTE: I do not code on linus - nor do we roll out linux boxen for production. its all NT (Solaris in the next month) right now because of cheap foolish clients. I have been using linux since '96 (slackware.. where has bob gone?)
I work for a funded eCommerce company. I get paid salary (and great benefits) as well as I get 5% of what I bill (my billing rate is 175$/hr) if I bill >= 100 hours/month || 10% (!!!) if I bill >= 150 hours/month (almost impossible). No I cant bill every hour at work and it seems that I usually work 15-35% more than I bill - so if I bill 100 hours I usually have worked 115-135
hours that month - still pretty nice bonus.
NOTE: I do not code on linus - nor do we roll out linux boxen for production. its all NT (Solaris in the next month) right now because of cheap foolish clients.
I have been using linux since '96 (slackware.. where has bob gone?)
You write: how can you compare decisions that may affect the lives of thousands of employees and/or shareholders and the decisions which may make it difficult for some users to read their mail for an hour or two?
... try "some millions" instead. Countless businesses depend on those communications, many for their primary source of income. Yet you contrast it with the jobs of board directors who's main accountability seems to be to their own bank accounts, and who if they screw up usually get "punished" with a golden handshake. And worse, who seem not to care at all about the lives of those employeees to which you referred. [Shareholders do seem to be cared for, admittedly.]
You clearly underestimate the importance of computers and communications in modern living. You say "some users"
Well, let's put this on a more equal footing. There are many jobs in a corporation, some of which can be done by anybody and some of which can be done only by people with special skills. When it comes to ranking them, ask yourself a few simple questions, such as "Can the company survive without person or group X?", applied to everyone in the company. It might open your eyes a little.
In a closed system, most high-tech companies can survive without their top directors (because lower managers move up, and there are always some good ones around), but cannot survive at all without their skilled technical staff (promoting the tea lady doesn't help). Good directors and managers are important because they let the company do more than just survive, but still the key element is the technical one, a fact that they would like you to forget. In a non-closed system, professional skills are of course bought-in, and that's the case for tech positions now as much as directorships, and at long last, the rewards are starting to reflect the importance of technological expertise just as they have always reflected the importance of top management.
Some call this the Rise of the Techies, but whatever you call it, it's just a reflection on the realities in the world around us. Technology is become key.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Salary is good, but it gets abused these days.
If the salary is a good one (Nice $$$) and the job duties are acceptable, it's great. I recallin school being told that one of the benefits of being on salary is that you get paid to do a job, not by the hour.. so if you have a good day, and get things done early, you can take off... and if you have to work late, you don't get paid extra. This is supposed to work out nicely in a fair world.
Many employers these days abuse this. For instance.
They put you on salary. One of your job duties, though, is to be 'In the office from 8am-5pm mon-fri'
Might as well be paid by the hour. You never can get off early, and if you have to stay late to get your job done, you have to stay late.
An interesting thing I read in Alberta Labour code though.... even a salaried employee is due overtime if he works over 8 hours a day. Period.
Now *THAT* is interesting, as I've never seen any salaried employee here claim overtime.
I suppose, though, that this only applies if you are *told* to work overtime, as opposed to just deciding to stick around and get the job done.
Like many salaried employees, half the time when I stay late, it's so I can meet the goals I set for myself. Nobody is forcing me to work my ass off.
I had an employer, once, who attempted to 'deduct' a days pay because I could not attend work for a day. (I was salaried). I asked them about this, saying 'I don't get paid by the hour. How do you figure you can do this?'
When I pointed out how much overtime I would claim if they started to treat me like this, they changed their tune in a hurry.
Now, I'm no expert on labour law, and it differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction throughout the world. But I think salary is fair if you feel it's fair to you, period!
Some days, when I have to work late for weeks on end to get a project done, I think *I really wish I got paid overtime. This isn't right..*.
But when the project is done, and my time is my own, and things get a bit easier, I'm sure glad I'm not punching a clock.
In other words, all the sparc20's and ultra 1's are getting replaced by E450's or E4500's with lots of processors.
/w 4 9GB drives, can you have a RAID controller controll all 4 drives and not use the on-board SCSI? I was just unpacking our new E450 Wednesday and noticed that our RAID controller didn't come with cables to hook up to the 4 drive SCSI backplane that comes with the box. The cables that come with the box are not long enough to unplug from the on-board controller and into the RAID controller. So, is there some cable we can order, or can the RAID controller only be used with the 8 drive SCSI backplanes that you can install (and, I think when you order one of the 8 drive backplanes you get a SCSI controller with it, which would be useless since we have the RAID controller)?
Ohh, I've got a Q for you then. In a E450
Thanks!
I worked at one place that had a "Polish Salary". You got paid a set 'salary' on the assumption that you would work a full 40 hour week. anything over that 40 hours was paid as OT. If you worked less than 40 hours, you got paid the 'hourly wage'.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
I have a fixed schedule for 40 hours a week; during these times I have to be in the office. I can't decide to just work a 35 hour week this week to make up for last, nor can I work from 10 to 9 if I feel like it without endangering my job.
About 35 of those 40 hours are explicitly phone support. This leaves me next to no flexibility to experiment with new things, research, work on large projects, etc. All of these things in theory take place during that 5-hour difference. In reality they take place in the evening or on weekends. Last weekend two of us pulled an all-nighter doing annual inventory and patching Windows 95 machines for y2k. It was inspiring.
Providing support for a restaurant means working "McDonalds hours" (my supervisor's words, not mine. no, I don't work for McDonalds). This means a substantail number of required, scheduled evening and weekend shifts. There's no shift premium. We trade off working the sunday-night, midnight till 2 or 3 shift.
I receive comp time at a rate of 1 for 1 for any hours above 50 worked in a week. I can take this comp time at the discretion of my PHB, who pretty much says "Take it any time, just make sure there's coverage" which means I take it during those 5 hours of project time, or try to convince someone else to put in overtime to cover for me.
To get my comp time I have to submit an itemized report of how I spent my overtime hours.
The situation as it stands has all the worst features of salary and hourly. I'd much rather be hourly. I felt more salaried working for $6.50 back in school.
I work for a small software company and that's more or less how things are: I'm payed on salary, but if they see I've been putting in significant overtime they'll pony up the dough. A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to find and extra two weeks pay tacked on to my regular pay cheque for most of the overtime I had worked over the last couple of months. Not to mention that they also pay out bonuses, too.
Of course, if I worked for a big-ass company full of PHB's, I wouldn't expect the same treatment I get now. I'd probably prefer hourly in that case.
It's salary all the way. I don't know _any_ engineers who are paid hourly, except perhaps consultants. (I'm an electrical engineer, BTW).
I don't get overtime pay, but I don't care. I'm fairly well compensated to start with, and if I'm busy, I'll pull 10-12 hours a day if necessary. If things are slow, I can take off early or whatever.
I think it's best both ways, my company has a relatively fixed cost for salary every year, and I have the flexibility to work as much as needed.
Ask me to punch the clock and get paid hourly and I'll quit.
You CANNOT get engineers to work like that. I've worked at an "hourly" job before and it sucks! Sometimes you gotta work just that bit more to finish up, but you can't cause you gotta get authorization to pull overtime first and all that crap.
My brother is a CompSci guy, and he also refuses to work hourly (as do his peers), they'll work however long and whenever they damn well please. (Oh you employers don't worry, it's always at least 40 hours per week).
I work at a local hospital (also a Medical School) and we in the IS dept are mostly hourly. Having come to this job from a long string of salaried positions I was dubious at first. However, I soon changed my mind when I realized I'd get time and a half for overtime (which can be taken as pay or comp time), 3 hours minimum pay for any call in - even if I only worked 5 minutes! Additionally, we generally have to get pre-approval for all overtime. I'm a fan of this particular rule since I absolutely HATE working overtime - especailly the 24 - 30 hour call in stints I endured in salaried jobs. This completely eliminates the "cult of overtime" mentality rampant in the computer industry. It also eliminates the preferential treatment management gives to ovetime junkies whose constitutions are genetically suited to this type of abuse. Bottom line: Hourly is great! I'd hate to go back to the slavary of the salaried job.
Ok, my situation is a little weird because I'm a government contractor, but anyway... this is the fourth contract I've worked on, in the same office, doing the same thing, with three different companies. On the last contract I was hourly, and mostly because that company didn't have a clue what they were doing, I wound up working a LOT of overtime. But on this contract I'm salaried, and the only real difference I can see is that unless we've got a MAJOR problem that requires lots of overtime, I don't get any overtime compensation. As for timecards, I've still got to fill one out so the company knows how to bill the gov't (I also on occasion work commercial contracts, so they need to know who to bill.) No holiday pay (we get to use 'personal leave' for that) and no sick time, unless you're sick for an extended period. ./'ers have been talking about. Anyone else dealing with this sort of thing?
Unfortunately there aren't really any other employers around here that can match the scale and scope of what we do here, so there's not much incentive to offer competitive benefits.
The bottom line is that I don't really see any of the benefits from being salaried that other
I believe that the critical issue is whether you have a job or a career. A job is something you do to get money to do something else, and a career is something that you love to do (or are at least committed to).
Hourly wages are best for a job. Management will think twice about overtime, and will pay dearly if they request it. However, keeping track of the time is horribly tedious (ever do a timesheet for NASA? Ouch!) Also, the rewards for exceptional output are more... indexed, and less attractive.
I prefer my present compensation scheme for my career. I am salaried, so I have the flexibility to schedule my time as I wish. I get bonuses if I complete large projects. I don't have to keep track of time that I spend configuring networks, or reading Slashdot for new ideas (a practice my supervisor has learned to love ). If I really work my tail off, I get a bonus and some comp time. I also get really great stock options. But, nothing is guaranteed. It all comes down to how well I market myself, and how much my boss cares. It is almost as much work as filling out a time sheet, but the reward is much greater.
It's great.
(The worst possible situation is to be salaried and a gov. contractor that still has to turn in a timesheet -- the numbers must always add up, no matter what you did. Those were the longest weeks I've ever had.)
Hehe, nice one.
Well, I used to be an academic too, and I must say I initially viewed the transition from tenure to contracting with trepidation, one extreme to the other in terms of security, or so I thought.
But it turned out to be quite different. Real security is when your skills are needed by virtually all modern corporates, and when the rewards are high enough that it takes only a few years to buy your house outright. The security of having a regular paycheck forever in academia (unless you bugger the burser, so to speak) that is so tiny that you don't expect to pay off the mortgage before retirement, well, let's just say that it leaves something to be desired.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Resist wage slavery! Stop sucking the cock of capitalism and think for yourself for a change!
And may it long continue!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Sorry about the AC, too lazy to log in...
Anyways, I worked at a major canadian telecommunications company for a year and a half, and the policy there was to pay salary, but then any overtime worked was compensated at time and a half. Also, anything more than 8hrs in a given day got you a free supper up to $10...just hand in the expense sheet at the end of the month.
That way you get the guaranteed wage of a salary position, but the management has an incentive to plan so that they don't need people working overtime.
Seems to make a lot of sense as far as I'm concerned....
Chris
Many moons ago (~20 years) companies treated salaried workers as professionals and as being part of the management team. This mindset has slowly collapsed in most industries.
The implicit dividing line up to the early 80's seemed to be: salaried == ivory tower, college educated/and/or management, committed to company success, 'on the same team as management and the owners'; self-directed. IE, 'professional', holding to a higher standard than others.
By the same thinking, hourly == blue collar, caring only about pay, working against management interests, one of a faceless rabble, to be herded and directed.
Today, most salaried workers that are not directors or owners are essentially treated as tradespeople, and I would dare say are regarded much as hourly workers were 20 years ago as stated above. This goes not just for technology but also other nominally professional fields such as accounting and medecine.
Basically, ALL of us... salaried, hourly, even the PhBs that are blamed for simply being instruments of the blunt application of stupidity from above... are at-will workers with no guarantee of "anything". In fact, given the way employment law is usually applied, I regard full time employment as 'contracting' with a fixed price.
The point is, after reading some posts here I gather that a lot of people regard hourly compensation as an employee as demeaning... as a management signal that "you work for the money only"... I personally consider this view extremely naive. The ONLY question you should be asking (as a worker) is: will I make more money over the long run going hourly or salaried?
I am a contractor, working hourly as an external resource for several clients. Most of us who have adopted contracting for a living were 'de virginized' by one or more companies that exploited our personal desire to 'be professional'. The ripoff that salaried employment can be at many companies is usually pivotal in this career redirection.
The career track of a contractor usually follows the pattern:
- Work diligently as an FTE, believe in "the process", wait your turn.
- Be rewarded with broken promises: sub COLA raises; startup company rewards that were conveniently forgotten; fellow employees with little accountability but having "executive hair" etc. being promoted at a whim.
- Be branded and labeled "heads down", "just one of our programmers", etc. (IE, be insulted as well as having a shortcutted salary progression.)
- Finally, be laid off or fired for essentially doing your job.
I required, fully three of these cycles in order to make the mental decision to contract. As a contractor, I command MUCH more respect than I ever did as an employee. I AM professional too - completely self responsible for my further education... expected to produce tangible results... and hourly, to boot. And MOST important, there is NO silly salaried employment 'social contract' hanging over my head that both sides are obliged to fulfill. When I'm done, I'm out. I'm OK with that. That is quite a bit more 'delimited' than an hourly pay arrangement as a full timer who expects to be used for other things, but it illustrates that your pay arrangement does not define your professional personhood.
So, to everyone on the technical worker side who considers hourly "declasse", get a grip and look at the money... that's what counts. This work isn't a religious order, a calling, or really considered "professional" by anyone except us. To the executives we are just button pushers, a different flavor of machinist or other skilled tradesperson.
Just decide what is the best deal offered and go with it.
And to the manager who started this thread, your decision making is EXTREMELY foresighted and fair... because, whether you realize it or not, you are anticipating that your own people will be confronted with a similar career conundrum at some point, and you're saying "your time is worth something".
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Here in Illinois, all employment is "at will", meaning neither you nor your employer need a reason to terminate you or to quit. Salaried or hourly, you could be out the door at any time in such an environment...
this problem isn't limited to the high tech community. My step dad works for a hunting and fishing store (a chain of stores) as manager. Like all of the management they pay him a salary with little or no overtime benefits, when it comes to doing hunting or tackle shows they call upon the store management to run the shows. The management is used because they don't have to pay the wage kiddies any overtime. It's a real shitbucket too, if the management complains or so much as asks for overtime they get "reassigned" or even fired. It's rough to quit or get fired because unlike high tech jobs the lowtech ones are harder and harder to find.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I see this kind of thing every time there's a thread on salaries, and it always makes me wonder - how do all you people who post that you make such and such more that your coworkers (though never less, anyone else think that's strange) know how much they make?
Rifle through cabinets down in HR? Trade salary info with your coworkers (I'll trade you a copy of Joe's last review for a copy of Snake's)? Your manager tells you? Salaries are just published where you work? Maybe you can tell by what kind of car they drive...
Please clue me in, because I really want to know why everybody except me knows what the guy in the next office is making.
Shaun
Whenever I do jobs on the side, I always get paid hourly, and I always charge 100% more than the equivelant "salaried" rate.
So, hourly, definitely.. more $$$.
Where I used to work we had to track our time on a time sheet and we hated it. But, the boss tracked his time on a small pocket tape recorder and had the secretary type it up for him. Not only did tracking his time on the tape recorder save time, but he could also make notes about the various jobs, and he could do it all as he was in his car, thereby making use of otherwise waisted time.
So what do you think, is it realy keeping track of the time that we hate or is it the method used to keep track?
The question (albeit slightly-off-topic) that I'd love answered is this: do non-salaried workers (i.e. contractors) ever get a chance to do new things? In almost all cases that I've been involved in working with contractors, it's been the case that they were hired to do a specific task, and no more.
One of the benefits of salaried employees (non-tangible benefits) is that they have the freedom to try other jobs if they feel so inclined. Contractors are paid to do one job, and that's it.
Is this the case where others work? I'd love to go freelance, but I'm afraid that I'd only be able to work where I have my strengths. Right now, I can do a little bit of everything if I want.
--jeddz
Where I work, and I think this is common of Canadian companies in high tech/software engineering (on the West Coast anyway), we work on the principle of flextime, sort of a combination of salary and hourly:
;) Especially important if you're talking about programmers, who often prefer to work outside normal business hours.
- You are responsible for keeping track of how many hours you work in a week, which may involve keeping a timesheet.
- If you work more than 40 hours in a week, that time gets 'banked' for later.
- If you work less than 40 hours a week, you use 'banked' time (the extra time you've worked previously) to make up the difference.
- The company still pays you for 40 hours a week no matter how much time you actually worked.
- There is no overtime, or time and a half pay. You just take the extra time you worked off at some later date.
I think this is a really smart system - you get paid for all the hours you actually work. If it's busy, you work extra hours, then take that time off when things slow down. Also, this sort of structure lends itself towards setting your own hours - I think most salaried employees who are required to work exactly 40 hours (or whatever) a week are required to work during 'business hours'. With flextime, these hours are more, well, flexible
I guess I should also mention that in Canada employees get 2 or 3 weeks of holidays per year, depending on the company (2 at minimum, 3 pretty common for high tech), in addition to all the standard statutory holidays (about 12 days worth of those).
Well, I can tell from these posts that alot of people feel strongly both ways. Assuming the spread of opinions posted here matches the spread of opinions found at your workplace, why don't you just let employees pick which one they want? If they don't like what they picked, they should be allowed to switch.
You didn't mention where you are from. In other locations the laws are likely to be different. But in the US there is a big difference between hourly and salaried employees. Hourly employees are subject to a number of regulations such as minimum wage, overtime, and what not. And they MUST be paid by the hour. Every minute counts. By contrast, most managerial and professional positions are "Exempt", i.e. exempt from minimum wage laws. They may not be paid by the hour. Overtime may not be paid. They may not be docked pay for missing hours. They are literally paid to "just do the job".
I don't claim to be an expert. I'm not exactly sure where Federal law stops and state law takes over. I can tell you I was previously involved in a matter where these things counted, I was managing an exempt employee with attendance issues. I soon discovered just how complicated these things could be. It turned out we could not penalize the employee for not showing up outside of bad reviews and firing. That seemed quite unfair to those who did show up, at least to my mind.
At least in the states, I'd advise talking to someone who actually knows the labor law and doing what they advise.
Keep in mind this only applies to employees. Independent Consultants, who bill for their time or effort may do so as they choose. For legal purposes they are self-employed and they are billing for their business not their pay.
If you want to know who is an employee, again, ask an expert.
Bottom line, you may have little choice in the matter. I recall having been shown a number of regulations that made specific mention of programmers and other computer professionals as being exempt.
I think you're already paying the "standard" (whatever that means) amount. I've done contract work all over the US and parts of France and Germany of the past 12 years. I have zero direct experience with employee pay scales, but I've talked to dozens (if not hundreds) of tech & engineering employees about their pay and benefits, so I do have a lot, albeit indirect, experience with it. Salary with no overtime pay is the standard. If a project is particularly important to a company, then I've seen comp time and small amounts of money offered in exchange. Everywhere I've been, the smart employees ask for benefits like health insurance or vacation time. You'll probably never get time and a half (like an hourly employee), but you just might can talk your way into a week of vacation if you work 60+ hours per week for a year. If you're not one of the select few in engineering fields who are awarded health insurance, then the 60+ hour work weeks you do might be used as leveraged in your demands for health insurance. I've talked to plenty of 20-somethings who suddenly start to worry about their health after months of 4 hour nights of sleep, 80 hour/7 day work weeks, pizza or fast food for every meal, and high pressure jobs. That's when you suddenly realize you need health insurance. To the original poster, rather than offer overtime, show that you care for your employee's health by offering health insurance. Over and over in my contract work, I've noticed that most employer's don't care and the employees know it. Don't be like that.
I work for a small ISP and get paid hourly. I would much rather get paid salary because I am on call 24/7. If something glorks at 2am I'm the first one that gets the call. I would like to work out salary wages with an extra bonus for being availible 24/7. Currently, they have worked it out so I get no overtime at all regardless if I do have to wake up and fix something at 2am so there is no real reason for me to want hourly. I feel it is extremely unfair but I like the job and I don't want to find a new one. Salary is the way to go.
Salary or Hourly isn't really the important
question. If you make people salary, do you
plan to have them routinely work some or lots
of overtime, and get nothing at all in return
for it? You don't necessarily need to pay
double time or time +1/2, but you should do
something. Throw your people a friggin' bone.
Stock options, aggressive (read: high) salaries
and raises, flexible days/work-week/tele-commute,
etc...
I worked a job once which was 7x24x365 and
the situation was solved as follows: the
groups were given a shift differential if
for an evening/overnight/weekend shift. Also
all hours beyond 40 were paid overtime and
double time on holidays. This was adequate
compensation to attract people when needed
for the less-than-desirable night/etc shifts,
and also encouraged overtime -- so much that
policies on signing up for over time had
to be developed, since demand outgrew supply.
It was very nice to be able to make some
extra money around Christmas time, for example,
just by working a few extra hours. Meanwhile
some schmoe is working 60 hrs a week on
salary, being paid the same as our base for
40 hrs...
You've just got to be fair in working with
people, especially in today's tech job
market. If you're not competetive, your
talent will blow you off and go elsewhere.
And you'll be toast.
...We ask. Usually the topic will come up with coworkers over breaks (smoke, coffee, beating, whatever). Granted it is against company policy to discuss these things, but people are such that the topic does come up.
Usually it's something like:
--Man, they don't pay me enough for this sh*t.
--Don't worry. I probably make less than you anyway.
--How much less?
And there you are. You can either talk about it or not. Even if you don't say, "I make X per hour" or "I make X per year", saying "I bring home around 15% more than Joe" who everyone knows makes roughly 60k, is enough to get a good idea of who makes what. All it takes is one person's salary to use as a baseline and you can pretty much figure it out by percentages...
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Where I am, in Alberta, Canada, there is no legal distinction between a salaried employee and a hourly employee. Every employee has an effective hourly wage.
For legal purposes, if the contract of employment specifies an annual wage rather than an hourly wage - the effective hourly wage is calculated with the annual wage and expected hours per week of work. If the expected hours of work per week is not explicitly specified by the contract, it is 40 hrs/wk. This allows overtime to be factored into the salary - *if it's explicitly specified*. But if it's not explicitly specified, the employers are treading on thin ice (and the employees too - it's an offence to allow your employer to get away with violations of the Employment Standards Code).
As a result, salaried workers are covered under the same laws as hourly employees, and must be paid overtime for over 40 hrs/wk. That said, too few people know their rights, and too many employers take advantage of that. Worse yet, there's a cultural opposition to people who stand up for themselves.
While I haven't read every response, I don't think that anyone's mentioned that salaried vs. hourly is not an either/or situation. There's a third option, that of salaried, non-exempt. You get the same pay every pay period, so your paycheck doesn't change between 30 vs. 31 day months. However, you still get paid overtime when you work it.
Look into it--it's the way to go (unless you have programmers who like working without pay).
Yeah, you're right, man. We should all never discuss our salaries with co-workers, since that would inevitably increase the total salaries in the office. Of course we rifle through the filing cabinet when everyone's away...only dishonest employees who have their own benefit in mind instead of the companies' want more money for doing the same job as a co-worker.
With Salary, I do expect the company to track the quality / quantity of work and reimburse me in some way. This could be new equipment, more paid vacation, bonuses, conferences, extra "freedom", etc. For example, if I put in some major overtime to complete a project, I don't expect the boss to question my 3-week trip to Vietnam.
Hourly, I expect none of this. I work, I get paid, and I can use that money anyway I see fit. If I put in some major overtime to complete a project, I can afford to take an unpaid 3-week trip to Vietnam.
The joke I use is that it is "Democrat vs. Republican" (eg, Big Government that cares for it's citizens vs. Small Government that let's citizens care for themselves). If you can be that flexible, let each person choose. If you can't, talk to the people who work for you and see which they'd prefer.
So, I went out and found this site that explains terms used regarding wages!
http://www.moneywords.com. Neato. It was in Dice.coms links.
Save the whales! Save a tree! Save the acronym! Save your sanity by not reading this post.
Personally, you should respect the "lowly" intern or Co-op more! Today's batch of IT, MIS, CS etc. students probably have more to offer than your typical "experienced" employee with a degree in say, English or Basketweaving with a few training courses under his or her respective belt. $600 dollars a week is not too bad for an intern. But I have heard of much better, especially for CS majors. Of course, where I went to school, CS was strictly a hardcore programming major (other schools might have a more diverse curriculum, for better or worse). If you work for a bigger company you get better pay and bennies on average. But you may get stuck specializing in one technology and stifled by the bureaucracy. The opposite is probably true for smaller companies. As I was told by a headhunter a few weeks ago, IT workers are a dime-a-dozen now. How sad :-( But in the end, doesn't each of us just wanna be their own boss?!?!?! your not the boss of me! Pangus
When you work for 40 so odd hours with someone, you tend to befriend them. At least I do. And without asking or sneaking around that type of information always comes up sooner or later in one form or another.
I neither want to know or care what other people make, but it so happen that I have learned that info from some people. No big deal, I just don't care. If anyone wants to know what I make, I'll tell.
I believe it mostly depends on the whole package offered to your employees. I am currently a permatemp working for a Big Nameless Corporation (BNC, has nothing to do with the "Banque Nationale du Canada ;)) I am paid hourly, with time and a half for overtime. There are no paid vacations, sick days, and all I got for Thanksgiving was a lousy 50 bucks (USD, before deductions.)I am the only contractor on my team, the rest are regular employees of BNC and are salaried. Things were sweet until some PHB decided he would save 30K on a budget of 1.2 million dollars by cutting all overtime. My manager had to follow suit, and there we go, no more overtime. I would usually do at least 45 hours a week. (Money is nice...). At this point, if BNC's management were to offer me a regular, salaried position, I would take it in a heart beat. I am crossing my finger for the 1Q2000... The names have been changed to protect the innocents and the guilties... Mostly the guilties.
I presently work for a flat rate per hour under a contract (usually 3 month). My hours vary from 30 to 47 per week depending on how busy things are. Management pays attention to workload, hires permenants when it perceives a long-term workload increase, and contractors for a short-term workloads increases.
Can you put a dollar value on security? Last time I checked, the income differece between contract and permenant was AU10K for me. Exacly what "security" are you getting as a permenant? If the employer wants you out, you're out, or attending an unfair dismissal hearing. Would you want to stay anyway?
As a contractor you are insecure, you pay attention what marketable skills you are improving or gaining. The only security is in your skull and in the bank.
Well, I myself keep the day job, which pays about $60k/year, admin'ing Linux, coding PHP/Perl/Java, & Sybase work.
... about doubling it.
Plus, on the side I do contract work and bill between $100-$200/hour. But being that the work isn't enough to fill up all of my time, I keep the salary job for a staple. Its enough to supplement my salaried job nicely
Adding it up, and I find I've got it nice. The only problem is finding a company that doesn't mind you having your own side show. They shouldn't care, as long as you don't dabble in the same territory.
I am an FTE for a large software firm and I get a nice base salary + benefits + quarterly bonus + stock options + paid time off + sick leave + vacation + sabbatical after 7 years of service. This year alone I have made $160k plus a nice stock portfolio and I have 15 days paid vacation time that I have yet to use (any suggestions). I have done the hourly rate before and I was making $100/hr and averaged 50 hours per week. I had to pay for my own insurance, save money to cover for sick days, no vacation days, no stock options, I also had to pay for my own equipment (development tools, standard applications, laptop, etc..) and I had to pay for my own travel expenses. When I was a contractor I had to pay my way to developer conferences, training, seminars, etc.. but now as a full-time employee I get everything for free including food and some entertainment expenses are also covered. Hourly pay is definately good for certain positions such as System Administrators who are not required to travel much. Developers don't travel alot but in some cases they are required to (fixing a non-replicable problem at a customer site, etc..). Consultants usually travel around 40% of the time so salary is better.
Obviously, it would be better for employees to all talk openly about their salaries, but it seems to me that it is kind of a sensitive subject, and just isn't talked about.
Sounds like at least a few people work at offices where it isn't considered impolite to ask what somebody is making - live and learn...
Shaun
I've found that corporate decision makers look on software engineers as intrechangeable cogs (whether they admit it or not) and are only concerned with time to market. They have no loyalty to you beyond your ability to produce. I got tired of working like a mule for the same money as someone turning in a 40 hour week. So I choose to work as an independent consultant on an hourly basis. This puts me in control of my career. If someone asks for the impossible in a ridiculously short time I give them a reasonable estimate of time and effort so they can decide if they really want it done. I refuse to hack out someting as fast as possible and only produce well engineered software. If they think I'm blowing smoke out my keester then we part ways. I have yet to have that happen. Most folks are reasonable when you explain reality to them properly and in sufficient detail.
The bottom line is that I am in control of what I do for whom and for how much. There is some added risk since I have no "employer" and must find contracts. However, the security of being traditionally employed is a myth. In a real crunch they might keep you around a week or two more than a contractor, but an FTE (full time employee) can be downsized as easily as I can loose a contract. I make significantly more than a salaried FTE and can easily endure being out of work for a couple of months because I pay myself for vacation and unemployment insurance (savings).
Your employees' situation is a bit different from my situation as an independent consultant. If there is no increase in hourly income to allow them to create their own savings buffer, then they are better off as salaried employees with a weak overtime package (at least they have one).
d4,...,Nf3, or maybe I should use a Ratfaced Mcdougal?
There are a lot of comments here.. but I'll give you my take anyway.
YOu pretty much HAVE to pay tech workers salary, for several reasons. 1. I make on salary about $75k/year, plus bonuses. You can't get a good quality tech worker for less than $30/hr, and with 12+ hour days most of us work... overtime, double overtime, tripple time... I don't care who you are.. your going bankrupt. 2. We play around with toys a lot.. be it hardware or software toys, thats part of what makes us good, but do you really want to pay me $500/day to horse around with the new Catalyst 8540 in the lab? You can't and shouldn't stop us from playing with it.. since you won't give us training, we have to train ourselves. (don't even try.. I have worked for several companies who said they would give me all the training I wanted, and hardly ever saw a class.. plus it took an act of congress to get those few classes) 2. I work 12+ hours a day.. I don't want to add an hour to that figuring out how long I worked that week, and write it all down. I documented enough stuff this week thank you. 3. If I got use to getting paid hourly, and decided to go to a convention or something which will probably only get me 8 hours, I would be massively short that week.. cutting down on my toys. With a salary, I know what I am getting no matter what.. and can plan my toy buying appropriately.
Just some views.. I know all tech workers would love to get paid hourly, but you can't afford it.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
On the other hand, I can't agree that salaries are good things, at least not in the U.S. As a consultant, I feel in control of my work, even under tight time pressure. If I need a certain kind of (software) tool, I acquire it; if I need assistance or expertise, I seek it out. As a salaried worker, one spends hours trying to work around ridiculous restrictions created by corporate budgets and political pressures.
Btw, I was taught decades ago how to estimate my time for any contract. This procedure has never failed for me yet, so I pass it on here:
- Estimate how long you expect the job to take.
- If necessary,
- break it down into modules,
- count the number of modules, N, and
- multiply N by the most average-looking module, in terms of time projected to completion.
- Multiply your estimate by 1.5 -- because things always go wrong.
This gives me a very accurate estimate -- except that if other people have to work with me on the project, I multiple my first result by 2.5 instead of 1.5!Not all computer people are the same. Not all
companies are the same.
It sounds like your intent is to retain your
people by compensating them for the actual work
they do (your weak overtime reference). You're
concerned (rightly so) that they will eventually
find someone else who will pay them what the
market says they are worth. You want to prevent
that. That's good, most managers don't ever get to this point.
If they are still going to be employed by the
company (they aren't going to be converted
into contractors) then how you pay them
ultimately is a 6-of-one, half-dozen type issue.
Why not just give them raises? You work at a
financial firm, a lot of them give out cash
bonuses at the end of the year for performance.
If you're trying to do an end run around HR
(sometimes those people don't "get it" in time)
that's understandable. Tell you people, and
they'll work with you.
You might try other solutions, like trying to
find ways to reduce the amount of time they
have to spend at work.
However, if you're trying to re-arrange
things, so that it's easy to kick your staff
out the door, and bring in a bunch of H1-B's,
I hope your 1 or 2 really good people find
other jobs, without giving you so much as a
one day's notice. If you really want to do
that, just lay them all off and then institute
your hourly wage plan. Don't incrementalize!
I'm the assistant newcast director for the local ABC station, and I am hourly. The senior director is on salary, and he works over quite a bit (sure would hate to be him :). I get doubletime-and-a-half, not to mention a decent benefits package. I wouldn't go salary for anything.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
--
because I couldn't think of a good beginning.
uhh...
some of us have hotmail addresses because they're free and offer a hole to stuff junk mail.
maybe i am cheap, but it's smart if you ask me.
I'm mostly wondering what various posters actually do for a living. Being a physicist, I don't think my experiences are in line with what most people have posted here. The origional question asks about "high tech", which I guess is likely in this forum to be connected to programming or sys admin or some specialized, arcane things I know little of. So, for the uninformed, please indicate what kind of work you are doing.
In physics, it is very common to have a salaried position. I know some physicists who have specialized skills and consult for companies (or even on projects within the university...) and what strikes me about the difference between the positions is the need for marketing savvy.
Self promotion is very important in both, but in consulting work, a more mercenary attitude is prevelant (in my experience). Most physicists would be very happy to take a perminant position for US$40-50k/year - as long as they were able to continue their physics research. However, their is a glut of PhD physicists - at least for the academic positions available. Red-Hat-esque ratios (say on the order of 500-1) of applicants for jobs exist even at the community college level (no research, just a teaching position).
I offer this as an example of how different a "high tech" job market and job experiences might be. Don't take this as a complaint. I am very glad I have the opportunity to do fundamental physics research and it may be the most important work I ever do (as a job, of course: people are always more important than ideas.)
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
What if I just got out of school, rent an apartment in the Silicon Valley, own one car, single. Which one is better. And would it be worth risking my regular paycheck for some stock options and other benefits such as 401(k)?
Dude.. the prices aren't outrageous, if you are doing work for less then you are the one who is getting ass raped.
$60/hr is actually a GREAT price for computer work, assuming the tech working on it is halfway decent, which I suppose isn't true at most Best Buy stores.
Wintergreen Computers (local store in NW Indiana) charges $120/hr and they pretty much suck from what I've seen. I see a lot of computers come in that Wintergreen had "upgraded". A guy came in 'cause his fax software wasn't working right. Turns out the dumbasses took out a USR Courier because they couldn't get it to play nice with Windows (it was not plug-and-play, it had jumpers). They replaced it with some winmodem piece of crap.
So anyway, you wanna see ass-rape.. THAT is ass-rape.
not quite sure how this would be catagorized but i work salary and recieve OT pay if asked.. am i hourly or salary ?? dunno but this is perfect for me. why is it that a company that pays its employees salary doesnt pay them for ot ?? Doesnt make much sense to me.
I am a diabetic so I am sick a lot more than the average employee. I like to be salary for this reason, but I prefer hourly. Overtime wages can far exceed 6 or 7 extra sick days a year. I have taken comp time instead of overtime because my income doesn't go way up and I get and hour and a half off paid, for every hour of OT.
I have a big bag full of two cents and I'm coming your way.
Just wondering what PHB stands for...thanks.